What Culture Could Be

Alex Rosen has been a VC for over twenty years with over $14B in combined market cap from the companies he has funded over the years. You could say he’s seen his fair share of company cultures. One that enable growth and success of the company and others that struggle to gain momentum and alignment across the company because of a lack of a strong company culture.   In this episode, Alex shares his perspective on why culture matters and important clues regarding the health of a company’s culture.

As Jim Collins says, a large part of a CEO's job is getting the right people in the right seats on the bus. Of course, one of the best ways to get the right people in the right seats is to define a culture that attracts the best people. But doing that is more easily said than done. On the latest episode of What Culture Could Be, I interviewed Mark McClain, CEO and Founder of SailPoint Technologies, to get his perspective of how you build, and scale, a great culture.   Here’s what he had to say.

Culture and strategy go hand in hand. Hardeep Gulati, CEO of PowerSchool Group, which provides unified technology solutions for K-12 educational ecosystems, has worked hard to create a culture at his company that trickles through to benefit employees and customers alike. His priorities include: Putting People First Defining the Mission Building a Better Future for Everyone Responsibility Trickles Down Looking Forward

Forget mission statements. Your company’s decisions reveal your culture. Real corporate culture is operational. How are decisions made, who makes them, how transparent the process is all determine whether a company will thrive or.... This is one of many powerful insights I gleaned in my interview with Amos Schwartzfarb, Managing  Director at Techstars, a startup accelerator that provides companies access to financial, human and intellectual capital to fuel the success of their business.   Listen as we discuss: Culture starts at the top. What if the CEO doesn’t embody the best ideals? How do you incentivize a thriving sales culture? Culture is operations. How to maintain a great culture.

What would it look like to surround yourself with a team of people that were amazing at their job and you actually liked? That’s what Daniel Chait, CEO of Greenhouse, asked himself when creating his most recent startup.   In this episode, Daniel talks with me about maintaining core prosperous culture while experiencing dynamic growth and the importance hiring plays in maintaining that culture.

What is it about your core that differentiates your values from others? And how do these values extend beyond the words we print on the walls at the office? In this episode we hear from David Hawks, CEO of Agile Velocity.  He walks us through the transformative training and coaching AV offers and the key component of culture creation in implementation and long term success. David understands the role that culture plays in every facet of an organization.  Listen to the entire episode to see how it was apparent for him and his company and how he’s used it to create success in other businesses as well!

It’s impossible not to have a culture.  Bringing a group of people together results in a dynamic that can drive your company to the next level or unnecessarily poison the friction that must exist to create a beautiful product. In this episode, I chat with Blake Garrett, Founder and CEO at Aceable Inc., about existing in the arena of high stakes education and what it takes to maintain a productive culture amidst a time of rapid growth, fund raising, and business acquisition.

It’s all connected. And if you’re at the top, it starts with you. On this episode, I chatted with Sam Baber, Principal Consultant at Talent Experience Agency.  We all know that leadership plays an integral role in building corporate culture, but growing access to data and metrics provides tangible displays that not only show this reality, but can serve as catalysts to inspire leaders to engage with employees for the betterment of their business. Information won’t solve the problem, but it could inspire the type of engagement that starts down the road towards enablement and retention.

Symbols connect to us emotionally.  They’re powerful tools in relating ideologies that convey, challenge, and create culture. On this episode, Gabe Krajicek, CEO at Kasasa, talks with us about “The Patch”, the symbol used by leadership at Kasasa to communicate a powerful cultural message that changes the work environment. Gabe says there’s powerful wisdom in understanding how each element relates to one another.  He learned the importance of culture creation from his father, and he hopes to build a culture that transcends and outlasts him.

Host Autumn Manning sits down with Brett Hurt, CEO and Co-founder of data.world, to chat about his experience in shaping culture at his tech companies.

CEO of VML, Jon Cook, shares from his 22 years of experience working for the same company about how workplace culture should be a priority for every CEO in business today.

Every single day people walk into their places of business and have a vastly different experience within their work environment than they do outside their work environment. In this episode we sat down with John Sigmon, Founder and CEO of Sigmon Leadership Solutions.  He encourages business leaders to be aware of their external and internal message and “bring the outside in” as part of a mentality to engage employees more effectively. John believes that companies who ignore this or refuse to make changes will lose in the job market competition that seems inevitable.  

Lee Burbage, Chief People Officer at The Motley Fool, talks about initiating culture change and the one thing his company did to make them one of the best employers to work for the United States.

Pete Hess share how meaning and connection are vital to any winning culture.  As the CEO of Lithium Technologies and former CEO at Advent Software, he has lead teams through practical exercises in developing real connections with their coworkers that allow for much needed dialogue on the issues of company mission and values and how they relate to day-to-day work for every member of the team.

In any business environment, people want to feel appreciated and prioritized. But how do you build that kind of culture at work? It’s a lot more than just putting a ping-pong table in the break room. Autumn Manning, Co founder and CEO of YouEarnedIt, is dedicated to driving and changing the conversation around employee engagement and performance enablement in companies of all sizes.   In this intro episode, Autumn shares that listeners can expect to hear a lot about what culture isn’t, and to take part in really honest conversations around what has worked in certain industries while building company culture, and what old tools need to be thrown out.