Company Culture Creep

“That’s not in line with our positive say-yes can-do startup culture,” a founder-CEO once tartly replied, when I explained why staff were grumbling about being forced to work on a dead-end project. This was the first I’d heard of the culture we enjoyed, but the primary rule of company culture is never admit you don’t feel like you’re a part of it, and loving it! In a way, you should never even acknowledge company culture exists, because you just so naturally and comfortably inhabit that culture. Zenlike, you are one with the company culture, which does not exist, because no one exists outside the culture and so we are all free. Namaste.

Company culture does exist, but only as an emergent property of the actions and personalities involved in a group endeavor. Actual company culture is often most visible in the strained gyrations to create artificial company culture. That CEO’s company culture, unbeknownst (perhaps?) to him at the time, was not about a positive can-do startup vibe as far as his actual employees were concerned—it was more like a crypto-Maoist cultural police state that pretended to be a positive can-do startup. A particular company culture is not conjured into being by saying its name, or insisting it must be so, or purging the culturally unfit to achieve homogeneity.

“Culture fit” is a wonderful and very popular excuse for firing people in the tech sector especially. It could mean absolutely anything, in an HR sense! When in fact it usually has a very specific unvoiced meaning, albeit one that is probably not legally defensible and certainly not something you want to get around.

I have lost hours, weeks, months of my life in management meetings at multiple jobs worrying about company culture, tone, mission, voice, persona, and all the other corporate facsimiles for human experience. I have endured countless presentations from external consultants and their accompanying psychological experiments meant to demonstrate their modular plans for cultural renaissance. In almost every case, what begins as a well-intentioned effort to refine focus and clarity ends up as a cudgel wielded against those who, for maybe unrelated reasons, are viewed as insufficiently orthodox. Sometimes, company culture is just the same old motives and grievances and agendas given a new coat of paint and a few dozen Powerpoint slides to justify their continued vitality. Cultural allegiance is an endlessly useful way to rank loyalty, suitability, and even ability, and to make decisions, allocations, and exclusions in accordance with a moral code less sophisticated than the Star Wars movies. Whether it’s fueled by office politics or personality conflicts, cultural warfare at a company starts to look a lot like cultural warfare in the actual culture.

Over time, a company culture becomes a stand-in for the business itself, serving as motive, vehicle, and enabler for business goals. Now, again, in a natural process, a company culture could emerge from the action of doing business. But, also again in tech, company culture becomes a useful dramatic device for describing the eventual utopia that the business will ultimately achieve. By far the best example is Facebook’s obsession with the concept of “connection,” a mantra used to justify both the crushing of internal dissent as well as how the company imagines it will help human society evolve to a better ideal.

There is such a thing as a really great, positive, can-do company culture, and I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy working at several. Common to all of those jobs was that we never talked about company culture, but we often talked about how much we loved working there. And we liked working there because of the work, our colleagues, and the fact that we were treated like thinking human beings rather than citizen-inmates of a Year Zero state.