culture-and-principles.md

Culture and Principles

Watch Blake describe this system in a video.

What is culture?

What is culture? How do you point at a company and say: "this is their culture"? Can you look back at a period of time and understand how it influenced culture? If you don't like a culture, can you change it? How do you hire for "culture"?

Culture can feel ambiguous, intangible, and inaccessible. Fortunately, it isn't.

You can read, listen to, type, speak, and think the culture of an organization. It's right there, in the conversations that are taking place every single day. Every Slack message, every watercooler session, every Jira comment, every 1:1, every all-hands, every line of code; they are all conversations that we're having or have had. Culture is simply the sum of all of these conversations.

With this mental model, we have no choice but to accept that every single person who works here is actively creating our culture every single day, every time they have a conversation. No one is spared this responsibility! So what do we do with it?

Culture creators

We've all been culture creators our entire lives, whether we knew it or not. Here's an example:

You're at the pub with a group of friends, having a casual chat, when one of the people at the table participates in the conversation by saying something inappropriate. There is a pause, where everyone says to themselves: "do I say something?" If nothing is said, the inappropriate conversation is deemed to be acceptable (at least by the perpetrator), and they may continue to act the way they've acted. If something is said, the opposite occurs: a culture of standing up for a moral code is solidified, and the perpetrator will either need to change their ways, or find another table.

If we think of culture as the sum of all conversations, we can sketch this out as a formula:

If no one says anything:

  All the conversations we've had 
+ the inappropriate thing that was said 
= our culture

If someone says something:

  All the conversations we've had 
+ the inappropriate thing that was said 
+ a conversation about how that comment isn't acceptable 
= our culture

It's that simple: one conversation changes the culture, and another may correct its course.

So, as culture creators, it is up to us to observe the conversations that we're part of. We must then ask ourselves: "are these conversations consistent with the culture I'm committed to creating?" If they aren't, it's up to us to make sure our subsequent conversations put us back on track.

Culture at scale with principles

At the time this is written, Bench has over 700 employees distributed across North America. At this scale—in order to be able to ask ourselves "are these conversations consistent with the culture I'm committed to creating?"—we must explicitly define our culture. This is why we have cultural principles.

First, let's look at the Bench Principles:

• Customer Obsession
• Ownership
• Empathy
• Empowerment
• Transparency

We recommended taking a deep dive if you aren't yet familiar with these principles.

These principles are designed to describe the how we do it aspect of our culture. They intentionally read like instructions, and are broad enough to apply to everything you do at work: writing an email, messaging a colleague, brainstorming with your team, commenting on a document, etc.

You can think of the five principles as the boundaries for conversations that are consistent with our culture. If a conversation exists within the boundaries of these principles, it is consistent with Bench's culture.

What we do in Engineering

In Engineering, we love the Bench Principles, but we felt there was something missing. Specifically, we wanted to define what we do in addition to how we do it. To achieve this, we decided to write our own, organization-specific principles.

How we created the Engineering Principles

Step 1

We wrote down what dissatisfied us about our existing culture, and grouped these statements of dissatisfaction into themes.

For example, there was a theme around feedback and learning:

• Talking to people about their growth often feels like pulling teeth—everyone would rather talk about their project work
• Individuals are afraid of uncomfortable conversations—some would rather quit their job that have them
• When feedback is given, it can do more harm than good because either the person giving feedback isn't doing it constructively or the person receiving it isn't emotionally ready to listen

Step 2

For each theme, we described aspects of a culture that we would prefer to what we're currently seeing. We took these ideas, grouped like concepts together, and wrote them in list format. This list was our first draft of the culture we wanted to create.

Using the example above, the list for the "feedback and learning" theme was:

• We have consistent, TWO-WAY conversations about growth with our reports
• Team members understand the transformational power that difficult/scary/uncomfortable conversations can have
• We have trained our team to give feedback in a way that helps others receive it

Step 3

We phrased the list items as axioms. Where possible, we wrote axioms that covered multiple list items.

Axiom: a statement which is accepted as self-evidently true.

The discipline of creating axioms forced us to be very specific in defining the building blocks of the culture we wanted to create. The number of axioms in each theme is small, but when read as a group they evoke a beautiful, complex vision for what our culture can be.

Continuing our example, the axioms for the "feedback and learning" theme became:

• Growth happens when an individual continuously asks themselves: is this the best I can do?
• To grow, we must step into conversations that feel scary and uncomfortable.
• Feedback is most effective when those receiving it feel supported by those giving it.

Step 4

For each theme, we defined a principle that we believed would result in the culture defined in each set of axioms.

For the "feedback and learning theme", we decided that "Foster Growth" is the instruction most likely to help people achieve the culture defined by the theme's axioms.

The Engineering Principles

Our work resulted in four principles:

• Create Value
• Foster Growth
• Succeed Together
• Build Agility

Learn more about our Engineering principles here.

We create immense value in the world while growing tremendously as individuals, and we do so on timelines that push us while also allowing us to live rich personal lives.

Sound idealistic? Of course it does. That's the point. This is the culture we're here to create, so why would we make it anything but incredible?

Using the Bench and Engineering principles together

As mentioned above, the Bench principles give instructions for how we do it, and the Engineering principles give instructions for what we do. So,when we have conversations about Creating Value, Fostering Growth, Succeed Together, and Build Agility, we must ensure that they live within the boundaries set by Customer Obsession, Ownership, Empathy, Empowerment, and Transparency. If this all seems a bit complicated, don't worry: there's a system.

A test suite for our culture

The axioms collectively answer the question: "what needs to be true for a conversation to be consistent with this principle?" This has a really interesting side effect: each axiom effectively becomes a unit test for a conversation.

For example, the axiom Rapid iterations create short feedback loops that inform great solutions is a way to "test" whether a conversation is consistent with Create Value. Similarly, Feedback is most effective when those receiving it feel supported by those giving it is a way to "test" whether a conversation is consistent with Foster Growth.

All together, the axioms act as a test suite for our culture. Every conversation we have, whether async or real-time, in a PR or in a Google Doc, can be run through the test suite to determine whether it is consistent with the culture we're creating.

Consider the following (made up but not uncommon) conversation:

Manager: 
In our last meeting, you identified that you have a lack of expertise in what you're working on,
and we agreed that you would come up with some goals about how to get that expertise.
Can you share what you came up with?
Engineer: 
To be honest, I didn't have time to think about this because of my current deadline.
Manager: 
I totally get it. Let's come back to this when you're less busy.

If we run this through the test suite, we see multiple failures:

Foster Growth

Failure: Growth happens outside of your comfort zone
Reason: Using a deadline as an excuse for not focusing on their own growth.
Failure: Permission to express dissatisfaction + support to drive change = continuous improvement
Reason: Letting them off the hook for being busy instead of intervening in the excuse and standing for their growth.

Succeed Together

Failure: We are successful in setting timelines when they push us without burning us out.
Reason: Somewhere in the planning process a deliverable was agreed on that didn't provide time for learning.

This tells us that this conversation is not consistent with our culture, and it also gives us a starting place for how to have the next conversation to get back on track. In this case two things are happening: the engineer is letting a deadline take priority over their own growth, and the manager is letting it happen—despite having committed to the axioms. That's not how we Create Value, Foster Growth, Succeed Together, or Build Agility!

Guided by our principles, a subsequent conversation could be:

Manager: 
Last time we spoke I let you off the hook. You used a deadline as an excuse for not 
prioritizing your own growth, and I let you do it. Your growth is at least as important 
as that deadline! So today, we're going to figure out how to make time for it.
Engineer: 
To be honest it's just really hard to find time to think about myself.
Manager:
We find time for whatever we consider to be our top priority. Growth is a long-term investment 
and you need to keep making instalments! So, I'm asking you to raise the priority of your growth. 
This might result in a temporary slowdown in your project. To be clear: I'm okay with that.
Can you take this on, and give me your goals at our one-on-one next week?
Engineer:
You know what? I've been putting this off for too long. I'll give them to you by tomorrow 
so we can review them async before our meeting.

This time, the manager steps right into the uncomfortable situation, and doesn't let the engineer off the hook for de-prioritizing their own growth. Notice that this is done with respect and compassion—there is no blame placed, and it is phrased in a supportive manner. As a result, the engineer gets fired up by suddenly seeing that they can make space for their own growth, and goes beyond the original request from their manager. This conversation is consistent with our culture, and it sets up their next conversation as well.

In the event that a conversation doesn't fail any tests and still feels inconsistent with our culture, we're probably just missing an axiom. If this happens, bring the conversation to your manager so you can run it through the test suite together and identify what's missing—as our culture matures, our test suite must mature with it.