Notes on Culture

The term culture has been used many times in this book with little explanation. Sorry about that. Entire books are written on what company culture is and how you can design your own, so the full breadth of the subject is somewhat out of the scope of these pages. We recommend What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture [Hor19] as a place to start.

But in short, culture is the effect that your company, your team, and your own management style has on others. It has nothing to do with having a ping-pong table or beanbags or an iced-coffee dispenser. It’s about the psychologically safe environment that your staff enjoy doing their work in.

Regardless of the company culture, the culture that you set within your team comes through your actions, intentional or unintentional. That’s why this book has given you a framework in which you can practice being a manager: how to do everything from handling your emails and to-dos, through to hiring and dealing with performance issues, through to the nuances of how to exist within the wider workplace. This ensures that you’re able to contribute toward a professional culture by being effective, mindful, and honest.

However, one important ingredient needs to be added to the recipes that you’ve read so far: you. For a culture to be successful, you have to be yourself. Many managers, upon being promoted, start becoming someone other than themselves to appear authoritative and in control. Don’t do that. Just be yourself. It doesn’t matter what you’ve read about other successful managers in other companies or how many talks you’ve seen elsewhere about how it should be done, because you will create your own team culture by being yourself while following the advice in this book. You don’t need to be anyone else. This means that you may have cultural differences with how your own manager works, which means you need to work harder on that relationship.

You’ll always have parts of you that need some work. For example, you might need to work on your written communication or on keeping your cool in frustrating situations. However, these are weaknesses that you should find by being yourself, and then you get to apply those fixes to yourself as well. This is why management can be such a rewarding profession: not only do you get to work on improving a team, you get to work on improving yourself. Not bad for a day in the office.

Your team culture will come from you. Be yourself fully and do a good job. The rest will follow.