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Define your organizational culture
It’s really easy, especially in the beginning when you are so worried about just getting through the day and the week and the month and making payroll and paying for overhead and making sure that your clients are happy. It’s really, really easy to lose sight in those moments of what your culture is and what you stand for, and what your values are. And sometimes you even focus on what those values are in terms of your product. And so you decide for example, that you’re selling a product that’s good for the earth, fantastic. But you forgot to define what your culture is within your organization. You forgot to define what it means to work within your organization.
And you might only have two employees, but by the time you have 30, 40, 50, it’s a little too late to define what the company culture is going to be. It’s a little late to define what it’s going to be like to work and come in five days a week into your office. What’s the vibe going to be? How are we going to treat people? What sort of relationships are we going to have with our vendors? Those sorts of pillars are really important to build from the beginning.
Define what it means to work for you
I was in a situation where I had been moving up the corporate ladder and I became so enamored with the company culture at that point. And everything that I saw around me that was incredibly cutthroat, that was all about just getting to the endpoint. Making sure that our customers were satisfied, making sure that we won at all costs. And I was brought in essentially to be like the fifth and last resort that was parachuted into our offices in Dublin. And I had people sleeping on cots and we were working on nights and weekends. And at the end of this entire process, we finally got to the point where the project was saved, customer was happy. And we were at that point where the following day, we were going to begin delivering actual files to the customer.
And there was one person in the company that knew how to make that very technical and very complicated delivery process function. And the morning that we were meant to deliver the files he called in sick. Now, remember that I was completely bought into this idea of winning at all costs. So my reaction to that was to take a couple of people within the organization, send them to his home with instructions to bring him into the office by whatever means necessary. And they did that. The day went smoothly. The following day, somebody on the team came to me again, first thing in the morning and said, we have another call from this particular employee who called in sick the day before, only this time he was calling in from the cardiac ward of the hospital.
I remember taking the day off. I remember walking around Dublin, rather aimlessly and taking a really good look at what I had become. I was in my mid twenties. And I realized at that moment that I had somehow lost my way. I hadn’t defined the values of what it was going to be like to work for me. And I had allowed this dominant culture around me to take over and fundamentally I had put a human life aside in favor of profits and winning. The lesson for me wasn’t to become less ambitious. The lesson for me wasn’t that winning didn’t matter. The lesson for me was that there was a really critical step that I had simply forgotten along the way.
It didn’t make my team happy, it didn’t make me happy to win at all costs. It didn’t create this sort of success that anybody defined as the goal that we were moving towards. It actually defined the entire thing as confusion and chaos and a lack of loyalty. And ultimately had I proceeded on the path that I was on, we might have won that particular project, but we would not have won as a company overall. And if you really want to be ambitious, and if you really want to be successful, you have to remember that winning is a little more complex than just bringing in the dollars at the end of the day.