Why team culture is the most important in a startup

After 1 year and 9 months of building and failing startups, I learned the single most important thing that would make or break one— team culture.

What even is a startup? Practically, it’s just a small group of people talking and working together to achieve the same goal at a fast rate. For a group of different people to work together efficiently, you must have something in common other than the goal of the company. You have to agree on which human values to operate your startup with. Your team members must genuinely be what your core values are. If not, it’s going to kill your startup from within.

What do we mean by culture? It sounds like an abstract thing. For me, culture is people. By my definition, culture is a group of people doing, relating, solving, influencing, and deciding on a daily basis in your company. If you have a hundred people doing these things, you, as a leader, should be confident and assured enough that all 100 of them are going to make the right choices. Culture is that invisible force that makes team members who work on very different things to produce outcomes that collectively move the startup forward.

How do we make sure that the culture we have in mind becomes a reality? Commitment to the core values makes all the difference. Every company has core values, but only a few practice them. After employee orientation, they’re just something you print on a paper, post on the wall, and forget to implement. We only remember these values when someone lies, gets poor performance evaluation, fails to meet targets, talks back to a customer, has many excuses for mistakes, or misrepresents the company. Only then do we recognize how ideal it would’ve been if we’ve rigorously implemented those core values from Day 1.

As a leader, you have to lead the whole team in small ways you could practice your core values. As a leader, you have to recognize which among your team is embodying these values and who don’t. As a leader, it is your responsibility to empower those who exhibit good team culture and to confront those who act incongruously to the agreed core values of the company.

It took us over a year to recognize the latter part of the sentence. Bad team culture starts with one person. The worse thing is that it is infectious. It could cripple the progress of your startup, and later, kill it from within.

In my experience, my gut feeling was telling me one team member is bad news, but I tried to understand and tolerated them. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt that they will prove me wrong, and that they were fit to be part of the team. It took me more than a year to voice my concern, and that’s when everything changed.

When you’re nice to people, they like you. When you’re honest, you’re a bad leader and you hurt people’s feelings. It’s difficult, but we should go back to our why. Did we build a startup to be nice to people? To tolerate bad work ethic? Poor performance? Dishonest methods? No. We built a startup for a vision of making something that will help people in their lives. This road is lonely, painful, with many lows, few highs, but it is the road to that vision. If it means displeasing some people along the way, then so be it. If it means being 100% sincere with your feedback, don’t hold back. The vision of the startup is greater than everyone in it. That’s why if you tolerate poor team culture, your motivation is not the vision of the startup anymore. It’s aversion to confrontation — to maintain imaginary peace and harmony. Sooner or later, you’ll realize you’re setting up the startup to fail.

You decide what will make your startup work — you get to decide what your core values are. If agility and fast growth are what makes startups work, then, agile people who can adapt well to changes make startups work. If there’s someone in your team you entrust with important work but doesn’t embody your core values, it wouldn’t take you long to understand why team culture is the most important in building startups.

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