Yearly Archives: 2023

The best company cultures act like magnets, repelling people as effectively as they attract people. Often, these same cultures operate from highly original core values. The type of values that are unique enough to have a polarizing effect.

To foster company culture, you have to address the behaviors that underpin your culture. However, establishing new behaviors as habits is no cakewalk.

When I had the opportunity to interview the CPO of Omada Health, Nancy Vitale, I was excited to hear that the founders spearheaded the creation and implementation of the company’s values.

Scaling a founder-led, start-up culture is the ultimate challenge. However, success yields large results. Reuters’ data shows that the top 400 founder-led companies have registered an average share price gain of 58.4% compared to just a 10% return for the top 400 stocks led by other founder-led companies.

The CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings wrote: “In all creative roles, the best is easily ten times better than average. The best publicity expert can dream up a stunt that attracts millions more customers than the average one. ”To capitalize on this idea at the company level, you have to grow what Hastings refers to as your “talent density.” Talent density is the collective amount of talent held by your employees.

Considering that 70% of employee engagement can be traced to an employee’s relationship with their manager, you would expect that most companies would get intentional about leadership development and company culture early on.

One of the most effective strategies to scale and sustain a rapidly evolving culture is to establish a values system. To dive deep into an example of a rapid-growth startup that built out a highly effective values system, I met with the Chief People Officer of National Resilience, Mara Strandlund.

How do you create a culture that revolves around speed at a company with 7,000 employees across more than 40 countries? To learn, I met with Vivian Welsh, the chief people officer (CPO) of Veeva Systems. 

Since research correlates 70% of employee engagement to management, the way a company develops its leaders can be incredibly telling of its culture. At Databricks, Reichanadter and her team emphasized leadership development during Covid as the company flourished.