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In all the hiring I've done at now 3 massively scaling tech companies, I've been asked 100s of times "how do you maintain your culture as you grow?" with the most recent instance coming last night from a candidate in Sydney. I've had about 14 years to think about this answer. 1/
It's starts with a simple recognition of what culture is and isn't. Culture is not something between us or among us. It's not the facilities, the food, the dogs, the fact that we dress down, the processes or basic operating practices. 2/
Culture is something that is inside each of us. It exists and becomes the fabric of a company because of our ability to manifest a set of core values and our willingness and capability to aggressively and relentlessly pursue our common purpose. 3/
When put this way, it becomes clear that you can not only maintain your culture through massive scale, you can actually enhance it, simply by learning to test for a person's ability to manifest your company's core values and by probing their will to pursue the common purpose. 4/
More interesting is that because the company is scaling, it's generally going to be seen as more successful & therefore more attractive, which means there will be more people interested. More shots on goal, if you will. 5/
More shots on goal means more opportunities to hire people who are, counterintuitively, a better culture fit for your company than many of the incumbents. Don't @ me. Incumbents always hate this idea. 6/
Failing to scale your culture, then, is a failure to articulate what you value most, failing to articulate your purpose / mission and then failing to bring people into the company who can and will manifest those values and who will relentlessly pursue that purpose. 7/
Companies who *do* scale their culture well always hire with their core values in mind. Google hired for Googliness. (Seriously). Every packet had to demonstrate probing on how Googley you were. We also checked for buy in on the "organize the world's information" mission. 8/
I will take to my grave that as we went from 2000 employees to 10s of thousands, we routinely hired people more Googley than we were. 9/
Twitter enlisted a few employees to create the company's core values, all were 140 characters or less. :). One of my favorite practices was putting a laptop skin on your machine representing your favorite core value. Mine was "Communicate fearlessly to build trust." 10/
We believed that Twitter's role in the world was to give a voice to the voiceless and shine a light in the darkness. No one could escape an interview with me without proving this meant something real to them. 11/
Qualtrics has TACOS (Transparency, All-In, Customer Obsessed, One-Team, Scrappy), also developed by an employee steering committee (& not handed down from on high). Our ATS features a specific template asking interviewers to rate candidates on how TACOS they are. /12
Our purpose at the Q is to help companies design and measure breakthrough experiences, close experience gaps, and deliver breakthrough results. We extract human misery from the system. You bet I'm checking for that in interviews! 12/
I think I have a somewhat unusual perspective on this as someone who has managed through this critical scale phase twice and am managing through it now for the third time. I hope this perspectve is helpful, but I'll take just a little bit interesting. 13/
Bottom line is that by making sure you are crystal clear on what you truly value and crystal clear on your purpose / mission (those are synonyms, btw), only then do you have a prayer of hiring not only cultural fits, but also cultural bar raisers... 14/
Thereby enhancing, not reducing, the company's culture as you scale. 15/ <end>
