Why do I start with a soft topic like culture? A culture sets clear rules and directives on how everyone is expected to behave on a daily basis, independent of the task or activity at hand. It clearly defines what behaviors are encouraged or penalized. And that alone can save you so much time and interpersonal conflict - a first example of an area of investment that reduces your need for a big management layer. The absence of a clear culture usually requires constant human intervention to keep everyone in line.
Now, if you put the right people into a clear set of expectations, they will likely succeed along those expectations - or fail with them. Making sure people know how to act, behave, and collaborate inside a company is, for me, what culture is about. You set the playground and define the rules of the game on how people are expected to interact with one another. In the absence of such clarity, you have a lot of meetings where it is about resolving conflicts between peers. Cultural fit is therefore one of the core aspects of hiring into a managerless organization.
In the absence of it, you would need managers who offer their time for those meetings and provide value by resolving those situations. But I can't see value in dedicating people's time, in this case managers, to mitigate the absence of a functioning culture.
In another chapter, I will get more specific on how to hire for cultural fit. Get ready for talks about bias and gut feeling - a beautiful combination. But first, let's talk about how to nail the culture.
An organization is a complex body, and the culture is its soul. It's something you can't see, but it is always there, carrying you through bad times by creating cohesion not through business success, but through purpose. And purpose isn't as volatile as business success, specifically in the environment that I spent the past 20 years - startups or early-stage businesses. Yet, writing this statement made me feel a bit sick - or at least gave me some spontaneous reflux. While I stand by its words, it also carries inherently the problem most companies have with culture. They have a tendency to make it an intangible because they also believe it is a soft topic, maybe even opaque. Something you seemingly can't measure, yet too often I hear leaders praise themselves and their company with the words, 'we got a great culture.' Too often I feel the need to ask them what's so good about it, yet who wants to pick that fight.
Book recommendation: How to Measure Anything
The issue is that something you can't express in a few words or describe through clear observation is something that can change without you knowing it - for better or worse, obviously. By its undefined outcome, this means you are betting on luck. How can something create cohesion and carry you through bad times when you don't know if it is still there when you need it? What I am trying to say is that if you are not ready to invest time into describing with words and without ambiguity what your culture is, you can also just stop reading here.
The principles should help you with that.
I repeat, culture can create cohesion and is the backbone of establishing a managerless structure. Just imagine the following scenario: Your company is having a rough patch and you just lost a major client. Your targets become unrealistic, and you don't feel good about it. Now, what usually happens is that managers start talking to their teams or doing 1:1s, giving pep talks, and informing people about why it isn't that bad and how you'll get through this. Haven't we all heard the infamous speech on this being an opportunity? Yes, surely that can work, but it is utterly inefficient and requires a lot of time from employees attending those meetings, with speeches being prepared - all while no actual work is being done. Only a few can do this without much preparation.
Now let's talk about the two pillars of culture - the mission and its principles.
The Why - Your Mission
Now, instead, imagine a world where reciting a few sentences allows people to lift themselves. At Tier, that was our mission statement: 'Change mobility for good.' And it always hit the spot when hiring, but most of all in bad times, of which we had plenty. Why are we pulling through? We always wanted to continue our journey to change mobility for good, so just because we didn't win a tender, getting more regulated than a tank on a bike road, facing public hate, and navigating a company through a pandemic and supply chain disruption doesn't mean we stop pursuing that mission. Hardware issues? We cared deeply because that does not reflect our mission, and we pulled all-nighters. So just with this little sentence, we were able to carry an organization. It described the reasons why we wake up in the morning and get things done.
How did we come up with this statement? Did we do a workshop? No, it was just dropped. My Co-Founder Lawrence used the statement once in an investor pitch, without thinking too much about it. But it clicked, both for us and the investors. It described our ambitions so well and was so bold at the same time, all while being so simple and memorable. Not only did we want to change the way people were mobile. We wanted to change it towards something that finally makes sense, for all citizens regardless of shapes, ages, and backgrounds - towards a livable city again. Since then, we always used it. What did I learn from this? You might not need a workshop to build your statement; you just need to listen to what is being said in the company and recognize it when you find it. Specifically in the early days, when every company builds their own lingo and starts to speak in tongues.
The How - Step by Step Ferociously
On the day-to-day operations, the how is the part where we tell people how we are winning regardless of the activity or initiative someone is working on. How we are getting every day a small step closer towards our mission.
The best example I have witnessed so far is the three pillars from Thoughtworks (or Ben and Jerry's, where it apparently has been taken from). They express clearly what the company is striving for in their daily life, and it shapes their behaviors and decision-making processes - all this in the absence of a manager. When working at Thoughtworks, at a client, in the absence of a manager, we as a team functioned along those pillars. We argued with the client along those pillars, and we stayed unified along those pillars. And honestly, those pillars are the reasons why so much great alumni have come out of Thoughtworks. Great outcomes are created if a group of people consistently, in their daily activities, give their best for a common goal - this is the moment we see true successful execution as a result of a compounding effect.
The social justice pillar was the reason people spent extra hours at a client to ensure money was being made for the better of the company. Times were tough when Thoughtworks had to sell the company for inheritance taxes, and this pillar left the company. Instantly, people questioned why they should continue spending those extra hours if the common good was not present anymore. So yes, what has been built up in years can be destroyed with one decision or announcement. Consistency is hence key!
A culture can, though, also be a work of many pieces. At Enter, as the CPTO, I obviously care for the tech culture. I described it through a few sentences as the starting point of our tech strategy before addressing the what that described in more detail our area of investment.
I can't count how many times people resolved a meeting without my attendance by quoting those principles. So I am happy to share them with you as another example, one that is right now in use. Those principles stand since January 2024, and we only wordsmith a few sentences over time, but their essence has prevailed.
Tech Culture at Enter - Our Principles to Live By
- 1️⃣ Common code access - Nobody can restrict anyone from making changes anywhere in the code; nothing is off-limits. We want to unblock ourselves from delivering value and not rely on someone else's time. We consider restricted areas as a sign of low quality and build code and processes to be accessible for others in the company.
- 2️⃣ No gatekeepers - Gatekeepers slow us down, introduce parallel processes, hence waste and cognitive overload. They often deviate over time from their initial intentions when they were introduced. The path to production should be a steady and reliable stream without artificially introduced bottlenecks. We value automated, reproducible, and auditable processes over gatekeepers.
- 3️⃣ Simplicity - Simplicity over industry standards. A lot of well-known principles have been introduced by the likes of Facebook, Spotify, or similar-sized companies. We are thrilled that this is not a size we are at and most likely never will be. Therefore, we resist the need to follow best practices posted on blogs by big corporates, knowing that this is just not for us.
- 4️⃣ Embracing the small change - Changing the system must be fun and welcomed no matter who introduces the change. At the same time, we aspire to take baby steps at any point in time. Reducing the risk consistently, yet delivering frequently, we go step by step ferociously. Any change must follow a test.
- 5️⃣ Baked in quality - Quality is not an afterthought; it is not the chocolate chips we sprinkle loosely on the muffin. It is baked in, melted with the dough, and delicious. Quality follows us along the entire engineering journey.