The Key to a Strong Company Culture

I am sure you have witnessed a hundred different company cultures throughout your career. Some places are just downright toxic, and some are so laid-back that you get in your extreme-comfort-zone. At the end of the day, the key is NOT in the balance.

Hear me out – a company's culture is not something you put on a piece of paper, it is something that you curate and grow. So, naturally, it depends on the kind of people you hire. For growing companies, it means staying close to the OG team and carrying that ideology and philosophy through. Of course, sometimes the original team is not healthy and you set yourself up for failure. In that case, strategically adding leaders who can bring in the ideology needed (not the one you want) and then scaling up. This specific challenge is very common in agencies and companies that are maneuvering the 100-member milestone.

Nevertheless, the new leaders would not essentially land in with a culture and have everyone absorb it. The point here is to ‘cultivate’ the best aspects of the team and navigate the growth of the culture in the direction it needs to be.

The core idea here is that culture is curated, cultivated, and grown – it stems from the people you have and that is always a mix of people, and their personalities. In order to do that, you need to have an environment that encourages and celebrates moments of honesty, truth, expression, and opinion. A safe space for everyone to be their best and their worst.

This, of course, means a loud floor, arguments, and discussions on seemingly unnecessary things, and a tendency to clash almost every week between people of opinion. That is the chaos which is very much foundational to harnessing the best abilities of every team member.

This is specially easier in technology companies, where progress can always be judged from a logical perspective, so you are never in danger of affecting the end result. The focus can then be put on how you get there instead. The strongest feature of letting the waves ride is that it is a repeatable and predictable pattern, which can be measured. You can always have a clear understanding of timelines, possible issues, and the ways to solve them, when you clearly know how your team responds.

This does not mean that the ideology fails outside of technology companies – in creative agencies, for example, chaos gives birth to creativity which is otherwise siloed and sometimes even buried under policies about “how to do your job”. Systematic industries like production would not benefit from this, but any team that strives on innovation needs to have this dynamic of freedom among their people.

There are some drawbacks to this approach as well, but nothing that cannot be handled. One common trend that I have seen many times is that people tend to exhibit the toxic side of their behavior too often and others start feeling a lack of ‘professionalism’ – which is, in my opinion, an oversimplification. To successfully carry this culture, leadership at the grass-root level needs to have the buy-in and be able to handle tough situations amicably.

Another problem that is very common is being able to manage a wide spectrum of personalities. This means that company policies have to be carefully designed in a way to cater to everyone and that sometimes has a negative impact on the bottom line. The only argument that should suffice here is that the overall uplift in productivity and progress far outweighs this negative impact.

The human mind is designed to work, and designed to enjoy it. Unfortunately, most of our work-related ideologies have come from systematic labor management and that is not a healthy approach in managing dynamic people in innovative jobs. Loyalty, belonging, and a strong work ethic can only be achieved when the person working feels comfortable, at-home, and be able to fully express themselves in their work and around it.