Fundamentals of Successful Company Cultures

One of the things you will learn as you progress through your career just how important company culture is to your experience working there. You can have the greatest pay, best benefits, coolest technology - but they all don’t mean much if you don’t connect with the culture.

Company culture refers to the attitudes and behaviors of a company and its employees [1]. For example some company cultures love working long hours while others support work-life balance, some like creativity over error prevention, some have top-down and some have bottom-up.

One famous example is Netflix culture - people over process, avoid rules, share openly. Netflix is one of the most respected tech firms in the industry for their agility and strong pivots over the years, and their culture is a major reason. Learn more about it on the culture website.

My Philosophy

To build a successful culture, we need to focus on two main areas - internal and external success.

Internal Culture

Internal culture refers to how we treat ourselves and each other (or people within the organization). Borrowing values from Netflix, freedom and responsibility are two core values that allow you to pull out the maximum potential of people. Freedom to make decisions and responsibility (or ownership) to follow them through and to hold accountability for your actions. This can only be achieved through trusting your people to do the right thing for the company.

With freedom and responsibility, you have access to the scaling talent of your work force. Each person brings in fresh new ideas and points of view which can contribute to the success of the company.

Without freedom and responsibility, you have a command and control structure where only the leadership can make decisions and the accountability falls under leaders to get things done which breeds distrust among your people. People are as much likely to fight because they don’t trust the other, as much as not to say anything because they don’t trust them - in both cases the company loses.

External Culture

External culture is how you treat the outside world - which includes your users, vendors, and other partners. To build a successful external culture you need to focus on your relationships - those users, vendors and partners we just talked about.

When you focus on building relationships, you look past the short-term gains for long-term gains that will net you much more success. Building relationships can be achieved by making a series of decisions that are in the best interest of both parties (in other words - win/win scenarios) rather than one side’s interests. Over time this will build inherent trust between organizations that will weather the up’s and down’s of a relationship and will increase the effectiveness of the relationship and decrease the miscommunications and other faults of a shaky relationship.

The Connection

We talked about internal and external culture - but if you were paying attention there was one factor that tied the two together…and that was trust. Trust is the centerpiece of this whole framework. With trust you create your best work and then use trust to build long lasting relationships which brings your work to life.