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Want to Improve Company Culture? Kill It
Entrepreneurship Handbook
July 15, 2024
Hey readers! Welcome to EH weekly, where you can look forward to insightful lessons and practical takeaways delivered to your inbox every Monday.
In this week’s edition, we discuss:
The top mistakes startups make (according to a ghostwriter)
How to improve company culture (hint: you have to kill it first)
Also, our former lead editor, Michael Thompon, has his book coming out tomorrow! Scroll down for more details. (We've read it and we love it.)
Mistakes startups make — according to a startup ghostwriter
R. Paulo Delgado has ghostwritten for dozens of startups and founders, and most of them had the same misconceptions that have held all of them back (or worse, ended their journey.)
He shared them in the hope that his two cents of unasked-for advice would help other startups avoid the same fate.
Techies are terrible writers and founders don’t always get how bad this is for their GTM strategy — Tech people, and startups working on “the next disruptor,” become so engrossed in the tech that they forget that an external world exists. It’s all good having the big idea; without writing skills, how can you share it with the world?
Startups have zero clue what a press release is, what it’s for, and how it’s written — If startups grasped the purpose of press releases and wrote them accordingly, they could get endless press coverage. The urge to tell the world how hard you’ve worked, how incredible the product is, and how it will change the world is immense. But that’s advertising copy. Press releases are a different beast.
Every startup its their concept is the bee’s knees — This attitude to an extreme can also lead to blind spots, which leads to a failed GTM strategy. Sure, having to answer to VCs brings pressure — but it doesn’t change the facts. Either the product stands on its own merits, or it doesn’t. Your market won’t give a shit about your hype. Either the product is better than competitors, or it isn’t.
Entrepreneurs fail leverage the full potential of a book for personal branding — Books remain a powerful personal branding tool. Written well, they can open the door to countless revenue streams, especially if you sell info products or speaking gigs. It’s worth paying a consultant to help you strategize your book before you write it.
👉️ For a deeper read on these lessons, head here: 5 Mistakes Startups Make — According to a Startup Ghostwriter
We're thrilled to share that Michael Thompson's (former EH lead editor) debut book — Shy by Design: 12 Timeless Principles to Quietly Stand Out — gets released into the wild tomorrow.
It chronicles his journey growing up as a shy kid with a severe stutter to becoming an MBA leadership lecturer, career coach, and communication strategist for leaders at global brands like Apple and IDEO.
If you're looking to learn how to build connections with the right people, better bet on yourself, and scale the impact you want to make in the world, grab your copy today.
To Improve Company Culture, You Have To Kill It First
You want real talk about changing company culture for the better? You want the stuff that doesn’t come with upper-management checkboxing and high-priced consultants with perma-smiles pitching trust falls?
Joe Procopio has the ugly truth — if we’re going to change our company culture, we’ve got to kill the company culture we’ve got.
Define what culture isn’t — Culture isn’t magic or mysticism. It isn’t crystals and mantras. Culture also isn’t policy. It isn’t rules and mandates and slogans. Culture is a bunch of individual viewpoints expressed as a single entity. You can’t “rule” your way to changing someone’s mindset.
Define what culture is — A newly-formed company has no culture on day one. Zero. There are only the interpersonal dynamics of the small number of people on the team. Say you form a company with acquaintances and strangers. You'll all be very careful to try to understand those interpersonal dynamics. You'll all figure out ways to manage those dynamics in ways that produce positive outcomes for us and for them, i.e., culture.
Find and eliminate the root causes — The only way to find the root causes is to talk to everyone on your team. Everyone. Leadership has to do this. Not a committee. Not HR. Not an independent third party. The agenda for these discussions is something like “Why does it suck here?” You’ll talk to some people for 10 minutes and others for two hours.
Give your culture room to breathe — Once you’ve eliminated the root causes of a bad culture, all you have to do is give a good culture room to materialize. Don’t make rules, mandates, and slogans and don’t go all rah-rah zen spiritual until you see the culture start to tell you where to do this and how.
👉️ For more on changing your culture: To Improve Company Culture, You Have To Kill It First