Cracking the Culture Code – Why You Should Care About Creating Culture

“There is no magical unicorn that craps out great culture”

Those are words of caution from Dharmesh Shah, CTO and co-founder of Hubspot and self-anointed introvert that captivated the audience during his Dreamforce 2013 talk on developing and implementing culture in an organization.

Tasked with documenting the Hubspot company culture a few years back, Dharmesh claims it was the “hardest thing I’ve taken on in my career.”

Shared beliefs, values and practices – that’s culture

Company culture used to be standard – rules and regulations handed down from executive-level folks were accepted by employees as long as the benefits and compensation were good.

No more, Dharmesh found. That model is broken and Hubspot set out to figure out how to tackle company culture.

But why? As a business leader you probably think of 100 things more pressing than something as seemingly trivial as company culture.

Here are Dharmesh’s top reasons why to spend calories in culture:

  1. Creating a culture is hard, killing it is easy – left alone most things degrade to crap without outside intervention
  2. Culture debt is insidious and often interminable – hiring the wrong people can be a really tough and lengthy thing to overcome
  3. Good culture makes the easy decisions unnecessary and makes difficult decisions easier!
  4. The team determines the destiny and the culture determines the team
  5. Don’t just hire to delegate – hire to elevate
  6. Culture is to recruiting as product is to marketing – customers flock to great products, workers flock to great companies with good culture
  7. Helps the stars “shine”
  8. Whether you like it or not, you will have a culture – why not take the time to design?

We’ll have more from Dharmesh. Specifically – how do you actually go about documenting and creating the blueprint for culture code.