Culture Is a Notice-and-Name Job, Not a Declare-and-Hope Job

We didn't write down our company values for 18 months. Then something odd happened.

When we started Mass Relevance in December 2010, my co-founders and I knew we shared similar instincts, but we never sat down and stated our values. Six months in, I asked my co-founders what it felt like to work there. Six months after that, we'd hired the rest of the exec team. At 18 months, with 50 employees now, I asked the entire company the same question, independent of what we'd said a year earlier.

The words nearly matched. What the founders described at month six was almost exactly what 50 employees described at month eighteen.

That's how we landed on five values, oddly named on purpose so they'd actually stick: Awesomeness, Freesponsibility, Agilispeed, Transopency, Teamwork. (Yes, we made words up. Odd sticks!) Then we put them to work: hiring and firing based on fit to them, peer-to-peer recognition tagged to a specific value, quarterly awards for whoever personified one best.

Years later, when Mass Relevance merged with Spredfast, we found our values were nearly identical, just worded differently. That alignment is a big part of why the merger went smoothly. I've come to think values alignment is real diligence, not fluff, right alongside the cap table and the code.

The lesson I keep relearning: culture is a notice-and-name job, not a declare-and-hope job. It's already there in the people you hired. Your job is to notice it and name it, not invent it.

Have you actually asked your team what it feels like to work there, or are you just assuming you already know?