Culture Wins When You Listen to Your Top Performers

Retention is challenging for many organizations. Retention can also be complicated. Pay and promotions alone can’t keep your best people. And your top performers likely come from different generations and demographic backgrounds. If your employees can’t define your organization’s identity — and what’s distinctive about it — they are likely to head for the exit. This means culture needs to be a part of any … [ Read more ]

Liz Fosslien

I love Adam Grant’s tactic for interviewees to learn about an organization’s culture: A job candidate can ask, “Tell me a story about something that would only happen here.” It’s a neat trick for candidates, but when you’re a manager, and by consequence an arbiter of the company’s culture, you should be asking yourself that, too. What’s that story for your company? Does it involve … [ Read more ]

Kristi Hedges

Culture determines how work gets done, but values show how companies prioritize, make decisions, and reconcile conflict. A culture may celebrate innovation, but values determine what gets sacrificed in the pursuit of it.

James Allen, Scott Leibs

As companies move from insurgent to incumbent the original culture is often lost. A variety of factors contribute, but one in particular concerns talent management: As you implement more systems, you tend to hire the kinds of people who are comfortable working within, or running, systems. You jump from a “time of heroes” to a culture reshaped by hastily implemented systems that may drive away … [ Read more ]

William E. Schneider

Culture means how we hire, structure, deploy, compensate, and develop our employees to deliver on our customer promise. It establishes and underpins a company’s: structure, membership criteria, conditions for judging effective performance, communication patterns, expectations and priorities, the nature of reward and compensation, the nature and use of power, decision-making practices, and teaming practices (among others). It is about our community of employees. It is … [ Read more ]

Bethanye McKinney Blount

Compensation is culture, period. It’s how you pay your people and it’s where the rubber hits the road. It’s the metric you can’t cheat. It’s naive to think that you’re just going to give people money and they’re not going to feel everything that’s attached to it. Pay is incredibly personal and emotionally charged. It directly affects how we live our lives and how we … [ Read more ]

Melissa Daimler

There are three elements to a culture: behaviors, systems, and practices, all guided by an overarching set of values. A great culture is what you get when all three of these are aligned, and line up with the organization’s espoused values. When gaps start to appear, that’s when you start to see problems — and see great employees leave.

Tony Schwartz

A culture is simply the collection of beliefs on which people build their behavior. Learning organizations – Peter Senge’s term — classically focus on intellectually oriented issues such as knowledge and expertise. That’s plainly critical, but a true growth culture also focuses on deeper issues connected to how people feel, and how they behave as a result. In a growth culture, people build their … [ Read more ]

10 Hiring Hacks For Nailing Culture Fit From New York’s Top Tech Recruiters

Each month General Catalyst brings together leading technologists from New York’s top startups for a brainstorming session on an industry challenge or theme. Through an exchange of best practices, our goal is to move the collective tech ecosystem forward. This month, we focus on company culture. We hosted Chief People Officers and recruiting leads from New York’s pioneering startups and here are some of the … [ Read more ]

Juan Luis Suárez

According to Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, authors of Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, culture is “information that affects individuals’ behaviors and that they learn from other members of their species through imitation, learning, and other social practices.” […] And if we accept that culture is information that affects individuals’ behavior, then understanding it requires us to figure out what … [ Read more ]

5 Cheap, Old-School Hacks for Building Company Culture

Building culture doesn’t always have to entail a huge cost or commitment. In fact, some of the most powerful culture-building tools are essentially DIY hacks. Here’s a look at some of the most effective tools Hootsuite has found over the years.

When You Start a New Job, Pay Attention to These 5 Aspects of Company Culture

When you join an organization, you have a short window of time to adapt to its culture. It’s the old 90-day rule. And we know too many talented individuals who have stumbled in their new company because they failed to read the cultural tea leaves. This happens because most organizations don’t explain the cultural rules to newcomers, and new hires are so focused on the … [ Read more ]

The 8 Types of Company Culture

Our work suggests that culture can be managed. The first and most important step leaders can take to maximize its value and minimize its risks is to become fully aware of how it works. By integrating findings from more than 100 of the most commonly used social and behavioral models, we have identified eight styles that distinguish a culture and can be measured.

Michel Feaster

The best cultural lists are the behaviors you want to cultivate. The problem with values like respect and courage is that everybody interprets them differently. They’re too ambiguous and open to interpretation. Instead of uniting us, they can create friction.

Tae Hea Nahm

No matter what people say about culture, it’s all tied to who gets promoted, who gets raises and who gets fired. You can have your stated culture, but the real culture is defined by compensation, promotions and terminations. Basically, people seeing who succeeds and fails in the company defines culture. The people who succeed become role models for what’s valued in the organization, and that … [ Read more ]

Bethanye Blount

The clearest indicator of the values driving a company — your own or one you’re considering joining — is already in motion from the start, in one of the last places you’re probably looking: compensation.

Steven Tiell

When communities of people—in this case, the business community at large—encounter new influences, the way they respond to and engage with those influences becomes the community’s shared ethics. Individuals who behave in accordance with these community norms are said to be moral, and those who are exemplary are able to gain the trust of their community.

Over time, as ethical standards within a community shift, the … [ Read more ]

Cameron Sepah

Your company’s employees practice the behaviors that are valued, not the values you believe.

Cameron Sepah

Your company’s culture is who you hire, fire, and promote.