Steer The Ship: Culture By Design

As someone who felt like their voice had often been muffled at work, I always wanted to create a space where our employees could feel like they could contribute in their own unique way.

I thought that letting people choose their own adventure would lead to a healthy, happy workplace culture. Birds would sing, rainbows would fly out of everyone's ass, and we’d all walk around high fiving each other with perpetual grins stuck to our faces.

That’s what the best organizations do right? Freedom leads to creativity and people's highest contribution, I thought. This is how healthy cultures are born.

So I loosened my grip, took a step back, and waited for the magic to happen.

Our culture started to evolve. But instead of creating one healthy culture, this hands-off approach created multiple cultural factions with different goals and different rules. Even though we all shared the same value structure, each culture interpreted those values differently.

Everyone was doing their thing which is what I thought I wanted, but instead of feeling pride for letting people follow their dreams, I felt ashamed and embarrassed of the organization I’d helped create. It was nothing like the vision I saw in my head.

I remember saying to my business partners. “I’m pretty sure I would never get hired here, actually, I’m pretty sure I would never even apply to work here.”

We had no North Star. No common sense of direction or purpose. Working together took a back seat to individual ambitions. Our desire to let people build their own little slice of heaven inside our organization had created a fucking mess.

We had to rebuild our culture, this time by design. What we discovered was quite amazing.

A strong sense of culture doesn’t constrict people's creativity, it channels it. It gives people who resonate with your vision a place to fit in and use their gifts to contribute to their highest potential. A place to learn and grow, to discover more about the world around them and themselves at the same time.

It empowers people to make decisions, experiment, hold each other accountable to a higher cause, and makes it clear when it’s time for them to seek their happiness elsewhere.

Almost paradoxically, with stronger leadership and a shared cultural vision, people have taken ownership on a level we’ve never seen. Quite frankly I’m blown away by our leadership team and what they’ve been able to accomplish. It wasn’t instantaneous–we had to build trust, and it took some time to let go of the past but we made it through the rough waters.

You don't need to run a business to appreciate navigating with intentionality. Taking your hands off the wheel and coasting through your work, a project, your relationships, or the long game of life is a recipe for ending up somewhere that doesn't feel quite right.

So go steer the ship. If you don’t, someone else will. In fact, many other people will, and you might get lost at sea.