The document discusses an 8-point framework for assessing and improving company culture for scaling technology businesses. It covers the dimensions of individuality, responsibility, affiliation, communication, cooperation, in-group/out-group behaviors, learning, and hierarchy. Effective culture evolves as companies grow rapidly. The framework can help evaluate where cultural adjustments may be needed to continue high performance at larger scale.

1. COMPANY CULTURE
8-POINT HEALTH CHECKUP
For Scale-Up Stage Technology Businesses
OCT. 15, 2020
DAVE LITWILLER

2. INTRODUCTION
• Effective and productive culture is one of the foundational
elements of a high growth technology business at scale
• Culture: Beliefs, behaviours and embodiments of know-how
that are adaptive and shared by the group
• Company culture evolves
• Rapid and unexpected culture change in a scale-up stage
firm can occur in part because of:
• High growth and turnover of staff and management
• Fast moving technology
• Evolving competitive marketplace dynamics
• Strategic shifts
• Changing work dynamics

3. INTRODUCTION
• The past months have brought extraordinary adjustments
• The way that culture and values reinforce or undermine
each other has evolved; the way decisions get made has
changed
• The leadership of many rapidly growing technology
companies are reflecting on their culture, considering
both intended and unintended outcomes over the recent
past
• What follows is a high-level overview of the eight
dimensions I use when engaged to help scale-up tech
firms with culture health checks and follow-on tune-ups

4. OVERVIEW
Eight Pillars of Culture
1. Individuality, relative to teams and groups
2. Responsibility, including performance of colleagues
3. Affiliation and affinity
4. Communication and decision networks
5. Cooperation
6. In-group and out-group behaviours, internal and external
7. Learning and teaching
8. Hierarchy

5. INDIVIDUALITY
• What individuality means in the context of company culture:
A sense of high value in the eyes of co-workers and
collaborators
• A common characteristic of high performing teams: every
contributor is best at one important thing
• Most teams are small enough for individuality to be
appreciated by teammates, and to diminish free-rider issues
• Frequent interaction helps keep up relationships
• Distinctive individual contribution undergirds positive forms
of reciprocity, and honesty, especially when exchanges
necessarily are asynchronous and take different forms

6. RESPONSIBILITY
• Individual accountability to deliver results, even in group
endeavors, and engage constructively to get help when it
is needed
• Flip side: Cases in which people want to offload the risk for
outcomes

7. RESPONSIBILITY
• Having a common approach to risk
• More objective: regulatory, tax, accounting, legal
• More subjective:
• How far to sell or create expectations ahead of the curve
• Technological and scientific stretch
• Quality and sustainability of designs and workarounds
• Diversification vs. focus
• How much to leverage the ambiguity of human language to
gain commitments and forge agreements, when people
individually may have different incipient beliefs about what
they are agreeing to
• Growth hacks
• etc.

8. AFFILIATION AND
AFFINITY
• For the individual: Identifying who seeks out whom, under
different professional needs
• Direction, when a fast path to a good-enough outcome is
needed, but the right way to go is not immediately obvious
• Creativity to expand the range of options under consideration
• Winnowing down possibilities with a view to committing to a
single or bounded implementation path
• Sounding board, to reflect and gain perspective about issues
at hand
• Watercooler conversation: related to work and interests
beyond

9. AFFILIATION AND
AFFINITY
• Collectively:
• How respect is gained, kept, and lost
• Leaps of faith and deeply held beliefs, including local
adaptations
• Rites of passage
• How aggressive and competitive impulses are channeled,
internally and externally

10. COMMUNICATION AND
DECISION NETWORKS
• For individuals:
• Inputs
• Candor
• Deliberation style
• Decisiveness
• Communicating about the harder realities of the business
Situationally:
• When people want to vet or gain assent for choices
• When people want to source a range of ideas
• When people want to build consensus for a desired outcome
• When crises call for fast action, which often need to be more
unilateral with less time for consensus-building

11. COMMUNICATION AND
DECISION NETWORKS
• For groups:
• Learning how gossip circulates, in both its useful and
harmful forms
• Seeing if the right information gets to the right people in a
timely fashion, mostly on a push basis
• Ascertaining if knowledge is getting across time and space
to build the collective intelligence of the enterprise, with
evidence of reliable continuous improvement and change
capacity
• Understanding the pathways for how decisions get made,
communicated and appealed, especially when there are
split views that can’t be easily reconciled

12. COOPERATION
• Cooperation serves as the basis for collective learning,
and the ability to achieve group performance that
improves upon individual insight and output
• It requires influence over whom people work with and
some fluidity in relationships to maximize the level of
constructive interaction that can be sustained
• This is especially important in challenging work at the outer
locus of technology performance, market impact and
operational excellence

13. COOPERATION
• Cooperation builds upon mutual trust in how people will
act, transparency, and the level of empathy they will
incorporate, most of the time
• Most telling is how cooperation changes when deadlines
are close and pressure on everyone is higher
• The ability to build and maintain an increasingly large web
of relationships and interdependencies across
collaborators in a growing enterprise is a powerful driver
for the ability to develop and advance both technologies
and workflows at scale

14. COOPERATION
• The larger the size of a cooperating group, the more effort
collaboration requires, and the stronger the incentives and
rewards need to be for individuals to do so
• Building informal cross-connections throughout the
business often takes more deliberate effort than formal
protocols, especially with remote workforces and hybrid
teams
• Heuristic:
• The number of regular mechanisms for building informal
cross-connections with hybrid and all-remote teams
typically needs to grow as the cube root of the number of
employees
• Ex: 5 mechanisms for 125 person companies, 10 for 1000
staff firms

15. IN-GROUP AND OUT-
GROUP BEHAVIOURS
• Significant leadership effort is typically required to keep
in- and out-group inclinations developing in a way that is
beneficial and not detrimental
• There are many ways that the tendency for similar people
to stick together, to an unhealthy extreme, can take hold
and become difficult to quickly reverse
• In-group behaviours can build up for trivial reasons that
have little to do with job performance or business
competitiveness at scale, which then bring obverse
problematic out-group issues
• Winner-take-most markets of operation require exceptional
care because of how powerful the forces unavoidably are
driving both in- and out-group behavours

16. IN-GROUP AND OUT-
GROUP BEHAVIOURS
• Internal:
• Assessment starts with evaluating cohesion and us-vs.-
them thinking and behaviours starting to form internally
• A good cue about where in-group boundaries really are
can often be seen by where egalitarian norms empirically
weaken

17. IN-GROUP AND OUT-
GROUP BEHAVIOURS
• External:
• Most productive to channel natural tendencies is usually to
build a shared frame of reference for those inside the
business of taking on the world, iconoclastically changing
the standard of performance, winning customers over
competitors, and warding off potential threats, thus tapping
into a kind of constructive paranoia
• Conversely, as success grows or increasingly seems
destined, a sense of affluence and comfort often
encourage selfishness and a turn inward

18. IN-GROUP AND OUT-
GROUP BEHAVIOURS
• Usually, to get the best and avoid the negatives from in- and
out-group propensities with teams:
• Develop and disseminate a widely shared agenda and
consistent prioritization for the scaling business
• Provide ongoing articulation of good examples for how to
balance among competing enterprise values and needs
• Having a shared outlook on how to manage the tensions
among competing objectives is what creates the social
mortar that helps bind an organization together
• Positively shaping tribal inclinations on an ongoing basis
keeps the mortar flexible enough to facilitate institutional
adaptability toward beneficial change, rather than letting the
mortar become more rigid and impedimentary

19. LEARNING AND
TEACHING
• Learning and teaching are two sides of the same coin
• They create reciprocity and social currency within the
business
• Together they reinforce identity, affiliation and cooperation
• They give gives people increasing amounts of intellectual
and social capital over time
• With them, knowledge access and growth comes to
traverse time and space

20. LEARNING AND
TEACHING
• The more people pull themselves and each other up in a
professional sense through the ability to both teach and
learn, the more it lowers the cost of acquiring future
information in a high velocity, uncertain environment to
improve ongoing institutional competitive fitness
• The faster the rate of change in the competitive environment,
the more important learning and teaching are to adaptability
• The alternative is to try to add and change people to achieve
the requisite internal adaptability, which becomes untenable
at scale if it is the principal lever for increasing skill
• Leveling up internally is as or more important

21. HIERARCHY
• Some is necessary to create the best conditions for
cooperation and collaboration
• Building and enforcing the right standards of performance,
including sanctioning the wrong behaviours
• Establishing suitable measurements and allocation of rewards
• Creating and maintaining hubs for information and decision
flow
• Managing and resolving conflict

22. HIERARCHY
• Too much hierarchy though reduces adaptability and
usually signals insufficient conditions to achieve optimal
individual and group learning
• At the other extreme, too little often causes overly variable
localized standards of performance and divergence of
success criteria to achieve cohesion
• A dearth of productive hierarchy is often identifiable with a
lot of jockeying for power, or issues that frequently bounce
around without resolution or clear ownership

23. HIERARCHY
• Role models are key
• Best are those who exhibit good skill, networks, learning
style, decision processes under varying conditions, energy,
integrity, communication style and who build influence
mainly through solid judgement vs. dominance
• People’s beliefs, motivations, preferences and
expectations are shaped considerably by those whom they
seek to model, including sometimes overruling direct
experience and individual tendencies of aspirants
• Role model influence requires even higher care in more
egalitarian cultures, which have less capacity to rely on
formal hierarchy as a safety net should difficulties arise
with informal mechanisms

24. HIERARCHY
• The apt cliché: You are what you promote
• The human tendency to mimic is powerful, especially at scale
and pressed for time with a lot of complexity that that people
may not be well equipped to tackle
• These are conditions under which people tend toward short
form methods for how to gain influence, stature and culturally
right answers, and will often emulate those in positions of
greater standing
• Leader reactions at critical moments are paramount because
of this echoing effect, especially in times of transition or crises
when norms or values are challenged or must change
• A closely related cliché worth repeating in this context:
• Actions are more important than words, especially over the
mid- and long-term

25. HIERARCHY
• Curating and protecting the right ways that prestige is
earned helps to get the benefits of some hierarchy, and
counters the tendency for negative forms of assertive
dominance to grow in the hierarchical organization
• Something to watch out for:
• Prestige is often transmitted across domains, even when
there is little or no basis for perceived prestige in
secondary domains

26. HIERARCHY
• To assess hierarchy, for starters, evaluate whether people
are gravitating toward those who posess skill and
excellence in what they do, or toward those with social
capital but who may be less capable in their functional
roles?

27. OVERALL:
CHANGES TO CULTURE
DURING SCALE-UP
• The culture that contributed so greatly to early success
during start-up often needs to shift at scale to
institutionalize outperformance, rather than relying as
much on a handful of founders and early employees to be
the cultural lodestones as often functions well earlier on
• What happens when founders and leaders are not in the
room or on the thread has high indicative value about
cultural evolution at scale
• With the growth of remote work, more aspects of culture
need to be made explicit, including how people should
connect

28. OVERALL:
CHANGES TO CULTURE
DURING SCALE-UP
• Even if the early culture remains appropriate at larger size,
culture can drift over time in unexpected ways
• Scale and success themselves create emergent cultural
characteristics, even with relatively stationary cultural
tenets from more modest beginnings
• Moreover, the increasing use and evolution of AI in internal
and external workflows can alter human interaction
behaviours with culture impacts, and not always for the
better if left unchecked
• Scale (and pandemics) make synchrony harder to achieve,
which adds variability to culture building and maintenance
• Time and space shifting technologies help reduce the
effects from having less synchrony, but they usually can’t
eliminate negatives entirely on their own

29. OVERALL:
CHANGES TO CULTURE
DURING SCALE-UP
• Changes in cooperativeness are usually the earliest signal
of cultural shifts, both good and bad
• The types of shortcuts that people do and do not consider
acceptable generally also provide early signaling value
about culture change, providing markers of what the
community and hierarchy condone to save time and
manage complexity
• Revisiting the eight elements of robust, high functioning
cultures in my experience provides one of the more
practicable frameworks for assessing empirically the
culture that exists, and identifying where adjustments can
help to continue to index toward higher performance at
scale

30. CLOSING THOUGHTS
• Well adapted cultures have significant room for variation, to
suit the people and the competitive landscapes in which
scale-up stage businesses operate
• Nevertheless, cohesive high-performance cultures have
these eight elements which provide a basis for ongoing
assessment and to help shape adaptation
• Extreme forms of one or more of the eight traits often signals
an ongoing requirement for many other extremes, which
becomes increasingly difficult and costly to perpetuate at
scale
• Extremes in one or more dimensions tend to make it very
difficult to attain one of the ultimate goals of cultural
development: autocatalyzing culture

31. FURTHER
DISCUSSION
For additional discussion about company culture health
check-ups and improvement for high growth technology
businesses:
dave.litwiller@communitech.ca

32. FURTHER READING