Lesson: Team & Culture with Dave Kashen

Step: #4 Aligned Culture: Clearly articulating culture and expectations helps attract the best people

So, how do you build this kind of core DNA, this articulation of what the intended culture is? This is where the purpose and values come into play, and because those words are so overused, you don't have to use those words but essentially if you want to maximize the chance of creating alignment throughout the organization, you need to be clear on what your aligning allows.

So, one is the sort of the direction, where are we headed, which I think purpose is a useful way to describe what’s the point, what are we trying to do here. Maybe another easier way to say it is what's the future state that we want to make and to create through our effort.

Highly impacts the culture and I think the culture needs to be aligned and the values need to be aligned with creating a future state so it is a part of the culture, but of course any company, any team, any group of people need to have a clear future state that they are trying to achieve. Otherwise you don't have a team, you just have a group of people. So it starts with just getting really clear and, again, I think the question, “What's the experience we want to create for our customers?” combined with, “Who are those customers and how many of them do we want to impact?” is sort of the core elements of that purpose piece.

So we want to make subscription billing that’s simple for a million enterprise customers or something to that effect. Then the discussion around values can be anchored in what you are trying to do. I think this is a common misconception or at least it is not well understood that the values of the company need to allow the team to thrive together of course, and allow the company to win in the market. And I think that last piece often gets missed. People think, “If I create this group of people who have shared values, we’ll all get along great together and then we'll win.” And I think it's necessary but not sufficient.