Demand Your Team's Full Attention

Founders,

Your team is your most expensive and valuable resource. A single great hire can alter the trajectory of your business. Tolerating mediocrity will lead to a mediocre team. It’s possible to build a healthy culture while maintaining high standards— in fact, low expectations often lead to more dissatisfaction and morale issues.

As a founder, your attitude sets the tone for your company’s culture. Whatever standards you set for yourself will be halved through each layer of management. You have control over your team’s culture, but it doesn’t happen by wishful thinking—you have to exert that control. Only the most relentless leaders build great cultures. It requires constant vigilance to reinforce good behavior and the confrontational stamina to address bad behavior immediately.

Hiring the best people is fiercely competitive. Do you expect an amazing candidate to join your company without meeting in person, possibly multiple times? Building an excellent team also requires the temperament to remove underperformers. A negligible fraction of poor performers ever become top performers. In most cases, after extensive coaching and months (or years) of effort, a poor performer merely becomes average. I’ve never met a leader who regretted a termination.

If you don’t own your culture, who does?