If you’re not thinking about culture, you’re not thinking about your company.

A thread.

People think culture is the parties you throw or the bean bag chairs in your offices.

Culture is actually the rules used to guide how your business solves problems.

People talk about toxic cultures all of the time. In most instances those environments developed because the rules either weren’t established or never followed.

When the rules (your company values) aren’t established, people will solve problems, they just might not do it in ways you intend or expect.

Or worse, they’re established but meaningless to leadership. You’d better believe your people will find them meaningless too.

We wrote ours 3 years in to business, and we live and die by them.

We say that your skills get you a seat at our table, but your values allow you to keep it.

To write yours, identify 3-7 people at your company who if you had 50 of them, you’d be the next powerhouse in your industry.

Ask yourself what it is about those people that is so exceptional. Why are they here and why do you find them so valuable?

Keep, kill, and combine that list until it’s something digestible.

Wordsmith it until it’s something tangible.

And get it in a format your people can read and understand. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sauceda-core-values-jay-b-sauceda

As you scale, you can’t solve every problem at your company. You need people to help you do that.

But what you can do is give them a rule book for how to think about problem solving.

The resulting solutions will be something your proud of and your people will be too.

Obligatory *you’re tweet