Scaling culture in a marketplace
How to communicate culture at scale, plus the extra challenges of being a marketplace.
This is issue #7 of Russell’s Index, where I write about the lessons I’ve learned—and continue to learn—as a founding employee at SharpestMinds. Subscribe for a new issue in your inbox every week(ish).
Culture at scale
As I said in a previous Index, when it comes to communicating company culture, actions speak louder than words. Andrew Grove summed it up perfectly:
Values and behavioral norms are simply not transmitted easily by talk and memo, but are conveyed very effectively by doing and doing visibly. [1]
This is very achievable with a small team. At SharpestMinds, we still have the entire company attending daily standups. Every day is a chance to reinforce the culture. How we behave in these daily meetings—our communication style, our decisions, how we delegate, how we handle bad news—will inform everyone else about how they should behave.
But, as we grow, having the entire team in one meeting will become a relic of our startup past. Larger companies have to be more strategic about communicating and exemplifying the culture they want to cultivate.
Shopify, which has been growing rapidly in recent years, has to deal with the problem of communicating culture at scale. Alex Danco, writing about his first 6 months at Shopify, relates what he was told when he joined:
In your first 6 months here, here is your number one job. Familiarize yourself with the dozen senior people at Shopify who have the final call on really important decisions, from Tobi and Harley on down. You need to familiarize yourself with their operating philosophy around business and around how Shopify works. Go consume every written memo and every podcast episode (we have a great internal podcast called Context) they’ve ever done, get inside their heads, learn their perspectives and their preferences, and learn what gets them to say Yes to things.
Alex was being told what the most important thing was for new employees: learning the culture. There was an actionable directive—“go consume every written memo and every podcast episode” from the leaders and, “learn what gets them to say Yes to things”. This is an excellent framing. “What gets [the bosses] to say Yes to things,” is a good working definition of company culture.
The fidelity of communication via podcast will never be as good as in-person meetings. But meeting with every employee does not scale. A podcast does. [2] The leaders still need to ensure that their decisions line up with the company culture. More importantly, they need to make those decisions visible to everyone in the company. Having a record of those decisions—and the reasoning behind them —in audio or text makes it possible for everyone in the company to observe and learn. Byrne Hobart sums up Shopify’s approach to culture well in an issue of The Diff:
Shopify is growing fast, and growth strains executives' bandwidth: they can’t communicate the company’s culture one-on-one with every new employee when the company is hiring roughly four new people every workday. In that model, the executives are still communicating the company’s culture, but only when their own visible behavior lines up with how they’ve said they ought to act. When bandwidth is constrained, you can’t transmit the entire message, but you can still send a checksum to verify that a local copy is accurate.
Culture in a marketplace
If SharpestMinds is still a small team, why bother thinking about culture at scale? Because SharpestMinds is more than just the core team of employees. We’re a marketplace for mentorships.
We have close to 400 mentors, and we’re onboarding new ones every week. They are not our direct employees but they have the lion's share of interactions with our paying customers—our mentees. So it’s important for them to share our cultural values.
But we can’t micromanage every mentorship. How mentors treat their mentees, how they communicate, and how they resolve issues—it all comes down to culture. At least, according to Ben Horowitz’s definition:
Culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. [2]
We’ve been lucky so far. The emerging culture in our marketplace was shaped organically by an initial seed of incredible mentors. By continuing to be active and visible in our community, they are helping to perpetuate that culture. Furthermore, the folks who apply to be mentors at SharpestMinds tend to self-select for the virtues we want to encourage. They are helpful, empathetic, and they think long-term.
But mentees and mentors are going to have different communication styles, learning styles, etc. Much of the value of our marketplace is that mentees can find a mentor that fits their particular needs and values. A mentorship is successful when there is a culture fit between mentor and mentee. This means that we can’t be too prescriptive about culture.
There are overarching values that generalize to all mentorships, however. Pinning down those values is step one. Step two is communicating them effectively. The latter will get harder as we scale. Right now, we can—and do—interview every mentor before letting them in the marketplace. This lets us screen for culture fit, but it’s also a chance to communicate our values to new mentors.
But this won’t scale. If we’re going to be the world’s largest mentorship marketplace, we’ll need to find more leveraged ways to communicate culture. We are leaning into writing more as a tool for this. But we have to do more than just write, we have to back up those words with actions. [4]
[1] High Output Management - Andrew S. Grove
[2] You only need to record the podcast once, but it can be listened to an infinite number of times. This idea of an internal podcast inspired us to create an internal blog at SharpestMinds. The same leverage is present—write something once and there is no limit to how often it can be read.
[3] What You Do is Who You Are - Ben Horowitz
[4] I do some mentoring myself on SharpestMinds. This helps us test our own product—a practice known as dogfooding—but it also helps back up our words. If I write about what makes a good mentorship, it packs a larger punch if the readers know that I’m speaking from experience.
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