Insights

Determining If You Have a Good Culture

“If you get excited about hiring people that are better than you, that’s a huge thing.”

– Jason Baxter

 

You know you have a good culture when it attracts people that mesh with your culture and it repels people that don’t. So, the culture in itself creates a situation where a lot of the time wasted on trying to figure somebody out, or should we work with this vendor or this partner, it works on its own to where those people don’t even arrive at the door. If they do, it’s a quick no. I think about that more and more, even as we’re interviewing. We get a lot of people that resonate with our culture right out of the gate, and that’s why they applied, as opposed to trying to find people that will resonate with it.

We’ve talked to several people about this as we’re bringing on new people. I know you and I are conscious of, “How does it impact people—the thought of this new person coming in that has more experience?” Another powerful part of a culture that shows that you’re headed in the right direction is when those people are excited about it. You have a culture where they’re wanting somebody to come in who has a lot more experience than them. I don’t think there’s many of those around. Most people have this self-defense mechanism where they say, “I want protection in my career and my job growth and if somebody comes in ahead of me that’s more experienced, what does that mean? I’m not going to get there.” But if the culture inherently says, “The better people that come here, the further we’re going to go, and the better I’m going to be”, that’s a huge thing. For a small company to have that, it’s pretty powerful.

It’s one thing when we hire someone and bring them in. It’s when somebody else in the company is hiring, and they’re wanting to hire someone better than them, not somebody just good enough to almost be as good as I am. That’s not going to move the needle forward.

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