Proof of a Killer Culture
Welcome to the latest entry in The Captain’s Log…
I’m your host, Bob, and my mission here is to share personal, behind-the-scenes stories of ups and downs from my career leading tech startups and corporate innovation.
I write to make you think, smile, and discover a shortcut to success or a trap to avoid.
Here we go…
By now, most of us understand how powerful a positive culture can be in the workplace. As an employee, culture is often the key reason you love or hate your job—no matter what work you do there all day. As a company leader, culture is the way things get done (or don’t) when you’re not around. No matter where you sit, it drives everything from profit margin to customer satisfaction to talent retention.
But to borrow from my friend, Brian, “If it were easy, every company would have a great culture.”
I believe once a company is up and running, past the 0 to 1 stage, the primary responsibility of its leaders is to build a high-performance culture. Take the part of you that invented new solutions and solved complex problems for your product or service, and direct it toward crafting an organization that can help you go from 1 to infinity.
I want to share a tactical example of building culture creatively. It’s an exercise and artifact that I’d love you to steal…
It’s a Friday in November 2019, and I’m sitting at my desk musing about the final few months of our company’s independent existence.
It feels like just yesterday (last summer, actually) that we closed the sale of our company to a much bigger strategic acquirer. Things have gone well since then. We exceeded our earnout goal months early, and our business is the new company's fastest-growing and most profitable product.
But things are about to change. In January, we’ll move from being a primarily independent business unit to full integration with the acquirer. There are rumors that its leaders are excited to carve up our team and retire our brand name. In March, we’ll get our acquisition checks. Many of us are planning to exit at that point.
So here I am, a few minutes before our weekly Exec Team lunch meeting, thinking fondly about the amazing culture we built together. The band is going to be breaking up soon. It almost feels like high school graduation—some friends will stick around, and others will leave town, but all of us are moving on in our lives after sharing something special. I wish there were some way to capture the magic we made together.
That’s when an idea pops into my head: We need a yearbook.
What better way to capture and remember our time together than this rite of passage borrowed from our school days? There is magic in seeing the people, places, groups, and accomplishments organized and edited thoughtfully. And in today’s world, where everything lives in a digital cloud, having a hardcover proof of life together seems even more meaningful.
I add the idea to my list of topics for our meeting and grab the bags of Chiptole for the team lunch on my way up the loft conference room. We hit the usual topics in the meeting, then spend the bulk of it planning our annual team offsite in January. As we start to wind down the meeting I look at my topic list and realize I’ve forgotten to share my idea…
“WAIT! We need to make a yearbook!”
The group looks at me in surprise; then they realize another “Bob Brainstorm” is incoming. I excitedly lay out the idea and rationale—and, thankfully, get smiles instead of eye rolls. Kristin volunteers to take the lead on the project, in part because she was on the yearbook committee back in school.
At the end of our all-hands that afternoon, I announce the yearbook idea and ask for volunteers. Twenty-four people raise their hands. Kristin starts organizing the group over beers, and the excitement is contagious.
There was plenty of regular work to do over the next few weeks. Our influencer campaigns are seasonally weighted toward holiday shopping, and there’s always a handful of clients that “find” budget dollars they need to spend in the last ten days of their fiscal year.
But the Yearbook Committee makes it happen. After hours, they meet at the office to lay out a timeline, responsibilities, and content plan. I try my best to stay out of the way so I don’t spoil the fun but pitch a few ideas I’d like to see come to life.
They create a Slack channel to collect photos and stories across our company’s eight years of existence. Former employees even contribute. It becomes an all-company project, but the committee keeps most things secret—even from me.
Flash forward to January 15, and we’re at the all-company offsite in a big room above a brewery downtown. We’ve had a good review of a killer past twelve months and a good planning session for the year ahead.
But before we open the beer taps, we pull out our boxes of yearbooks and start handing them out to each person. Our exec team got early access and spent hours writing personalized notes for each employee on those blank pages at the front and back of the book—just like we did back in high school.
The look on people’s faces as they leafed through the +100 pages of memories was priceless. We cycle between laughs, hugs, and tears as we balance beer glasses and trade each others’ books for signing.
As I drink in the moment—one of our last ones together—I think about how much I had changed in the process of building this business. When we founded it, I thought only of how big we could be in the market and how many zeros our eventual exit would bring in. But as things wound down, what I treasure most is the group of people I spend time with each day.
Good things can’t go on forever, but at least we had an artifact to treasure for the rest of our lives. I still can’t crack it open without feeling chills and tearing up.
Here’s a sample of the Ahalogy Yearbook:
Early in business school, I spoke with recent graduates who went into a marketing career. They said that one of the things they loved was that their work appeared on a grocery shelf and in the homes of millions of people. A few years later, I got to experience that myself as a brand marketer. They were right—it is cool.
I think it goes back to a core part of our humanity. We want to feel that we’ve made some impact during our brief time on this planet. And seeing physical reminders of this impact makes it even more meaningful. A company yearbook brings us back to both the success we achieved and the time spent achieving it together. It’s the stuff that gets lost in the world of software sprints, Zoom meetings, and the relentless loop of CRMs, OKRs, QBRs, CPMs, and KPIs.
Business is a social enterprise. We spend most of our waking hours interacting with other people to build something bigger than ourselves. This yearbook project and the end product made us appreciate this in a special way. In making the book, we made our culture even better.
I’ve never heard of another company doing anything like this yearbook. But I hope many others take the idea and make it their own. I don’t think it can make a bad culture good, but it can help make a good culture great. And it can be done anywhere from a 10-person startup to a 100-person team within a big company. The cost per person isn’t much more than a free meal.
Do this annually at your company offsite, and you’ll get people thinking about it all year. Your team will take more photos, do more activities together, and capture more stories of the ups and downs. And it can become an incredible recruiting and onboarding tool—living proof to new and prospective employees that your culture is truly special.
And as I told my team in our last meeting, if you ever forget what being in good company (culture) is like, go back and open this book. Just make sure you’ve got some tissues handy…
My team and I lead Hearty, a tech-enabled recruiting service that helps early-stage startups hire proven talent. Our senior team of repeat-exit founders sources and screens, saving you time and money. When you need help, let’s chat.
Feel free to schedule time together during my Open Hours for questions, feedback, networking, or any other topic.
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