Culture

What you say isn't your culture. What you do is your culture.

Culture is everything you do. It's the way you speak to each other, how you use your tools, document your processes and decisions. Culture is how aware your teams are of the processes they follow and how happy they're working in the company. Culture is how you write your ads for your job posting, the way you talk to candidates, how you hire or reject them. Culture is how you take care of every aspect of the work-life balance, the way you mentor your people, how you give them feedback and how you praise them when they do something great. I could go on for a long time but the point is: culture is everything you do, every single day.

The challenge for me as a writer is that every statement like "X is everything you do" is not the best starting point of a constructive conversation. If everything is culture, how are you supposed to build yours? Should you care about every single thing that happens in your teams? Should you control everything? It's OK to struggle while you build a good culture. Obviously, trying to control everything does not make you a good leader. At most, it can make you a good micro-manager. On the other hand, you may end up building a team that doesn't reflect the values you can get behind. How do you shape a culture that produces values you are aligned with?

The first step is to accept that you can neither control nor forecast people's behaviour. To overcome the struggle, leading by example is the simplest and most effective approach. Instead of just telling people what is OK and what it not, you show them everyday with your own behaviour. When people trust you, they tend to emulate your behaviour. Be aware though, it's a double-edged sword:

• It's good because people naturally do what you consider good things. As you do what you think is best, people follow your best behaviour.
• It's bad because people emulate your mistakes too. I expand on that in Lead by example.

In the rest of the chapter, I focus my attention on how to shape a culture you are aligned with and bring to light some aspects of culture that are often underestimated in product development teams.