What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

If you follow the first rule of leadership, not everybody will like you. But trying to get everybody to like you makes things even worse.

The final vital component of the decision-making process is “Do you favor speed or accuracy and by how much?”

The Heretic Every company needs lots of smart, super-engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them. But some employees look for faults not so they can fix them, but so they can build a case. Specifically, a case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons.

If a member of your staff is a raging jerk, communication can become nearly impossible, because people just stop talking in his vicinity. If whenever anyone brings up a marketing issue the VP of marketing jumps down her throat, guess what topic will never come up? Soon nobody brings up any topic of any kind when the jerk is in the room—and the enti

The natural thing for the manager to say is, “I hear you and, quite frankly, I agree with you, but I was overruled by the powers that be.” This is absolutely toxic to the culture. Everyone on the team will feel marginalized because they work for someone who’s powerless.

One way to think about designing your culture is to conceive it as a way to specify the kinds of employees you want. What virtues do you value most in employees?

Explain why taking the action you’re taking is essential to the larger mission and how important that mission is.

Culture is weird like that. Because it’s a consequence of actions rather than beliefs, it almost never ends up exactly as you intend it. This is why it’s not a “set it and forget it” endeavor. You must constantly examine and reshape your culture or it won’t be your culture at all.

As CEO, I wasn’t zero-tolerance about much, but I was definitely zero-tolerance on managers who undermined decisions, because that led to cultural chaos.