What is the Ideal Company Culture?

The ideal company culture is the one that allows you to execute your strategy in an effective way.

I know that is a bit of a cop out, but the reality is there is no one ideal company culture and each culture should be the right mix for the people that in your organization and is built to allow your people to do the best work they were hired to do.

This means each organization should have a different culture. After all, culture is created by people and every organization is made up of a different set of people. We founded Cloverleaf on the premise that culture is created by the collection of individuals that are a part of the organization. And at the most basic level a team has its own unique culture. This is why even in large, established organizations you will find many subcultures exist across the organization. IT and Sales often have completely different cultures inside the same organization.

Oftentimes I see teams or organizations try and emulate other cultures. This happens frequently with organizations in the midwest that try and create “startup culture” by adding beer kegs and ping pong tables. But the reality is it is the mix of day to day to motivators that influence decisions that often have the biggest influence on culture.

For example, a manager that says quality is most important but when confronted with production targets places efficiency over small decisions that contribute to a quality process / product. Employees notice these subtle shifts or incongruence and it will impact morale and ultimately culture.

Oftentimes organizational culture is heavily influenced by the founders and reinforced with hiring practices. When we started Cloverleaf we invested time early to identify values we wanted in the people we hired. After all, these values are key factors in creating the culture you want. We looked at ourselves and the characteristics that had been instrumental in getting us to key milestones as an early stage startup and identified the following values and embedded them in hiring practices to ensure we hired people that could reinforce this on a day to day basis:

• Relationships Matter - We are interdependent.
• Authenticity - the whole person matters.
• Optimistic Persistence
• Bring delight to work.
• Curiosity for growth
• Candor

You can read the original Quora post here. 

Are Your Coworkers Distracting or Helpful?

Yes. They are both helpful and distracting.

The idea of building relationships is that there has to be a balance between what I get from someone and what I give to someone and that middle ground is where trust and shared experiences lie. The cost of relationships is a loss of personal time and sometimes choice, but we often agree it is worth it in the long run.

In a work context this balance is also important. You want to accomplish great things but you need others to do so. What comes with that is distraction is an opportunity to leverage your coworkers experience, skill, knowledge and capabilities to create something better than you can do on your own.

If you were to plot each of these interactions along an axis (see chart below) each of them would lie somewhere along a line where some interactions were more distracting than productive and vice versa but more often than not a good work relationship allows each of you to be more productive than distracting and finding this balance is key.

Also, what can masquerade as distraction can also be the creative process. Who knows how many of those conversations become the next product or process breakthrough? I find that oftentimes what starts out as a disruptive conversation can lead to tips on how to be more productive with my own time. Small ways to use the technology or tools that I use each day a bit more productively.

Bottom line, learn to embrace a little of the distracting for the hope of being more productive and more satisfied with your work. Most research indicates that strong relationships at work are a key to being engaged in your work.

To see the original post on Quora click here.

What factors are most likely to change when a company grows very rapidly?

One of the biggest changes that happens with companies that grow rapidly is a sense of loss of control of the company culture. This happens because of a few key areas:

1. New people are added to the team frequently. For those employees that were there in the early days they feel a sense of loss of control. They may ask themselves questions about these new employees such as ‘what is their role?’ These people also don’t typically have the history and the context on why some things are the way they are at the company, which is why onboarding new employees effectively and accumulating organizational knowledge in a way that tells a story for new employees is increasingly important.
2. New strategies aren’t as widely known. In the early days any shift in strategy or new process / approach is often widely known because it is a small team that can be involved in that process. However, as the team grows larger and you add layers of management early hires lose proximity to decision making and an understanding of new strategies.
3. New locations or remote workers. As the company grows larger geographic proximity can start to become a barrier. New locations or remote workers mean there are more people who may not be connected to day to day decision making or have opportunities to build relationships with each other. This can cause the levels of camaraderie or trust to erode.
4. More process and control. Bigger organizations also need more process and control to make sure that information moves up and down and throughout the organization and that decisions are aligned with organizational strategy. Also, as organizations get larger there is more to lose and risk management becomes more important. This can cause less autonomy and more people that need to be involved with decision making.

These are just a few of the ways that fast growing companies can change, and not always for the better in the eyes of employees that feel a sense of loss for the changing culture.

See the original question & answer on Quora

How can a small business compete with a much larger one?

In short, be nimble and faster.

As a small business you have something the big co’s don’t have - Nothing to Lose. This makes you dangerous.

The bigger a company gets the more it has to lose and the more their decision making is based on protecting what they have and less about capturing new ground. Often, these companies lose track of what is even happening in the larger environment because they build their sales processes, operational control functions, marketing approaches, etc around keeping others from taking what they have and completely lose track of or unable to go after other opportunities.

But this isn’t your problem. You can be focused and try things the others would never be able to try.

One of my favorite examples of this is the early days of AirBNB. As a two-sided marketplace they needed supply of great homes / apartments to rent. They got so desperate to build their supply that they literally walked around NYC knocking on doors with a professional photographer to enlist people to rent some part of their home to complete strangers. And it worked. Before long they were growing fast, reached $1B in market valuation (unicorn status) and in just a few short years had passed Marriott in market valuation.

This fearless nature allowed them to try things they never could have done on their own and it paid off handsomely.

You can read more about how to fully capture this spirit in my book Corporate Bravery

See the original post at Quora.

What CEO Pay Says About Your Culture

This week I was reminded of Chapter 4 on Trust in my book Corporate Bravery when I saw two very disappointing news stories in the headlines.

While the two headlines may seemingly be unrelated that couldn't be more about the same issue - a culture of trust in business organizations. Or sadly, what has become a culture of mistrust.

The first story was the incredible arrogance of Mylan, the company that manufactures and has the patent for the Epipen, the shot used to treat severe and life threatening allergic reactions. While the news story of its apparent accelerating price increases has been bubbling to the surface for some time, it hit a crescendo this week when the CEO of Mylan Heather Bresch appeared on CNBC to answer questions.

What happened next was, well just see for yourself...

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000545943

One of the things Heather was confronted with in the interview was her sizable pay increase to over $18 million. To which, like most of the other questions, she changed the subject and failed to answer the questions.

My feelings regarding the entire Mylan saga was punctuated by a study released this week by Glassdoor, the online recruiting site that allows employees (and former sometimes disgruntled employees) to rate their employers. In the study they found that, "No matter how you look at the data, we found a negative link between CEO pay and CEO approval ratings."

The report continues by saying,

"Then, Glassdoor's researchers controlled for other factors, such as the company's financial performance, CEO demographics and how the culture was rated by employees on Glassdoor. After doing so, researchers still saw a clear link between the lowest approval ratings and the highest-paid leaders, though the effect was lessened in companies that also had a good corporate culture."

And it all goes back to trust and CEO pay is a major barometer for the kind of trust being established all the way down to the lowest levels of the organization.

In addition to mistrust, I document in Corporate Bravery how this disproportionate increases in pay packages at the top also cause fear based decision making that is clouded by protecting the growing pay they are receiving. "When focused on protecting what they have or what they can continue to accumulate, executives are far less likely to make good, bold decisions that create lasting, long-term value for the organization."

The same thing appears to be happening at Mylan as Heather and the executive team has clearly lost focus on the long-term impacts of their ability to raise prices past a point the public is willing to tolerate.

The Bravery of IKEA

This weekend I returned two Ikea chest of drawers, which could have been any weekend for any family. But this trip warranted a blog post on the bravery of Ikea.

As you may have heard about in the news, Ikea is voluntarily recalling many of the chest of drawers produced since 2002 because of the risk of tipping over and harming or even killing children.

Safety recalls are a regular occurrence in the retail / consumer products world so why is this one so special? It really comes down to the unprecedented response by Ikea on the issue.

Most people recognize that this isn't an issue that is specific to Ikea, but haunts much of the furniture industry. And despite many efforts to educate consumers and provide anchoring brackets with their products they went to unprecedented lengths to keep additional children from harm.

Included in the options provided to consumers were the following:

• Free wall anchoring kit
• Free installation of the wall anchoring kit on existing products
• Free pickup of existing Ikea products
• Full refund without receipt with clearly identifiable products (requires a bar code still be attached)
• $50 in-store credit for non-marked products

I received $265 in cash for the two products, both of which had been damaged over time by my young children.

As I remarked to the Ikea associate during my return process, this is the first recall or class action type situation where consumers actually won. Typically many attorneys get involved and consumers only see a fraction of the sum paid out by the company.


A fearful company would have continued to offer the anchoring kits and refused to do anything which could have offered a hint of responsibility for the deaths but Ikea went above and beyond the call of duty and set a new standard for how to handle product recalls. They truly put consumer safety above the bottom line. But I would say they still put the long-term bottom line first as they continue to acquire and retain satisfied customers that are loyal and will continue to buy their products.