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Module 8 - Your dream team

3. Company culture

If you’ve worked in different companies, you’ve experienced different company cultures. Some may be very laid back, others strict and hierarchical. Entrepreneur.com defines company culture as “a blend of the values, beliefs, taboos, symbols, rituals and myths all companies develop over time.” It’s easy to overlook the importance of being deliberate about company culture when you’ve got a million things on your mind, but the kind of culture you create (intentionally or not) at the beginning of journey will inevitably influence your company culture in the future. So perhaps it’s worth a second thought. What’s more the kind of culture you create will have a strong influence on your team dynamics and how your team performs. Culture always comes from the founders, especially in startups so think of yourself as a culture architect.

What kind of culture do you want to create? How do you want your days to be and your team to work together? Whatever you want your leadership style to be, make sure you articulate it and share it with your team. Create a relentless culture where work-life balance is non-existent, and you’ll soon find you’ve got a team that is stressed and prone to burnout. Or create a collaborative culture where personal life is as important as working hard, and you’ll likely create an extremely motivated and dedicated team. 

How do you intentionally create a company culture?
The great thing about starting a mission-driven business is that you have aspirations beyond making money and these help create your culture. In the branding chapter, we discussed identifying your company values. To be intentional about business culture, you need to figure out how these values show up in time and space. It’s all well and good saying one of your values is “transparency” but what does that mean on a day to day basis? How do you express this transparency with your employees, your investors, your customers? If one of your values is maintaining work life balance, how does that translate into everyday life? Do you let your employees manage their own time as long as they deliver results? Going through your values and identifying what these mean for your business will help you be intentional about the culture you create. Once this is done, you can opt to have an “audit” at regular intervals (once a year, once every 6 months) with your team. This can be in the form of discussions or anonymous surveys. It’s also important to remember that culture evolves so culture and values need to be revisited as you grow.

Entrepreneur view on whether culture or strategy is more important

“It’s chicken & egg argument. If you don’t have a decent strategy, you have nothing to build your culture around. But if you don’t have culture, you can’t execute your strategy. You need to be good at both. You need to bake a culture into your business model, a place where you want to go to work, and where people want to go to work, and where you can look at yourself in the mirror every day. But if you don’t have a strategic vision and strong strategy in place, you’ll never have the luxury to talk about culture.”

-Steve Dring, Co-Founder at Growing Underground

General team management
The way you manage your team is entirely up to you, but we thought we’d provide some quick tips:

  • Create focus: you have many opportunities to chase yet very few resources to do so. Make sure your team stays focused by setting targets. They should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Action-Based, Relevant, Time-Based) and you should set regular intervals to check how the team is doing in relation to them. That said, accept that keeping to targets can be challenging when the landscape is evolving. If you find yourself veering off course or chasing too many opportunities, take time to pause, reassess and refocus.
  • Decide how you will communicate with one another: communication can be tricky as the team grows. Informal systems of whatsaap, email and paper can get chaotic very quickly without a good system. Take time to think about project management and invest in software. Have a look at some of the organisational management tools suggested in chapter 6.
  • Know when to let go: as a founder, it can be tempting to keep control of all aspects of the business but it’s not a sustainable strategy. Work with your team to enable them to take on more responsibility. If you’re not hiring in expertise, work with your team to get them to be more proficient. Invest in personal development, this will help your business develop and will make your employees keener to stay. A good way of doing this is to discuss your employees’ personal ambitions and figuring out a way of fitting them with business needs.