Culture Is a Talent Multiplier
Culture is a Talent Multiplier (Or, How Culture Drives Performance) - Barrett Brooks





Editor’s Note: This is the first essay in a series on what I learned as COO of ConvertKit as we grew from $3M to $30M ARR and 20 to 75 teammates while being bootstrapped and fully remote (before it was cool). ConvertKit is a creator economy software startup on a mission to help creators earn a living by making sustainable growth tools for those creators. 







Culture drives performance more than talent. 



You’ve probably heard the advice to “hire great people and get out of their way.” I mostly agree with this and will build on it by saying “and create a culture that brings out their best.”



You can take a world class person and put them in a lackluster environment and all of a sudden that person will become a middling B-player. The inverse is also true – you can take a middling B-player in one environment, surround them with incredible culture and talent, and you might find out what they’re really capable of. 



I’m sure someone would yell at me about how talented people don’t let environments change them. “10x talent eats less talented people for breakfast and powers through the suck.” Well I think you’re wrong and it’s an abdication of leadership to say otherwise.



Above a certain level of cognitive ability and basic level of drive, most people are capable of performing at a high level. Add to that technical skills, emotional regulation, relational skills, ambition, resilience, focus and all of the other factors that add up to sustained performance over time. We might collectively call these factors “talent.”



Even the most talented people perform to the standards, norms, and incentives of the culture around them. This applies at nearly all levels of society – it applies to cities, to organizations, and to family and friends. 



Culture is a function of:




Mission and vision



Creating a shared standard in pursuit of (1)



Mechanisms to hold each other to that standard



Habits and practices to build the relationships required to meet the standard over a long period of time (ideally while having fun and growing as human beings)




It’s up to you as a founder or leader to create a culture that brings out the best in your team. I viewed this as my single most important job as COO at ConvertKit – creating a culture that encourages people to do the best work of their lives. 



This is the mental framework I used to bring that culture to life.



Have Clear Mission and Vision



Your mission and vision create a container – a north star – for the standard. You could have clear answers to every question above, but lack clear vision and people will not perform because there is no direction.



Our mission at ConvertKit was to help creators earn a living. Our 2025 vision (set in 2018) was to become the best marketing software for creators on the web as measured by:




Helping creators earn $1B in revenue



Serving 100,000 paying creators



Reaching $100M in ARR



Being profitable, independent, and remote



With as small a team as possible




Clear mission and vision was a cheat code for us at ConvertKit. We made it prominent on our site, included it in every job listing, and pitched it as a motivating factor to people we recruited to join the company. The team deeply believed in the mission and vision.



You can see how this vision starts to create bounds on the standard. We needed to grow fast, build for scale, stay profitable, not raise money, optimize for remote work, and find ways to grow without hiring new teammates.



Still, even the best articulation of mission leaves a lot up for continued interpretation, which is where making the standard explicit comes in. 



Create The Standard



Having a standard is something that’s hard to articulate without showing what I mean. 



Here’s a sampling of questions that can inform the standard at your company:




Do we value people with proven ability or with a steep trajectory to their career? Or people with proven ability and steep trajectory?



Who are we competing with for talent? Are we competing on market rates for compensation? Which markets? Which companies?



Is it important to take risks or guarantee success?



Do we publicly ship polished, finished products or MVPs?



Are we direct or avoidant?



Do we work 40-hour weeks or 60-hour weeks?



Are we money driven or impact driven or both?



How do we reward exceptional contribution? Money, promotion, praise, ownership, or nothing at all?



Is feedback valued or discouraged?



Are we a face-to-face or asynchronous communication culture?



What’s the expected response time to a Slack message or email?



Remote or in-person?



Should we check our personal lives at the door or get to know each other as human beings?



Is it ok to cry here or do we repress and reserve hard emotions for non-work time?



Do family commitments trump work commitments or vice versa?



Is it more important to measure inputs or outputs?



Beautiful or functional products?



Is individual performance or collective performance more important?



Do we take unplugged vacations or working vacations?



Spend for speed or practice the discipline of frugality?



Build the team or keep the team small?




Ray Dalio would call these principles. Jim Collins might call them values. One of my mentors, Seth Godin, frames it as “people like us do things like this.” 



I’ll call them the things you’re optimizing for – the collection of things that really matter. The standard. 



Again, there is no right answer here. Your answers can be whatever you want, but they must be explicit and you must repeat them over and over so that people know what’s expected of them.



An Example from ConvertKit



It was important to me that we recognized and valued the people on our team who needed to create boundaries on their work in order to deliver on their roles in their families. 



Being a remote team with people across the world meant we were default flexible on what hours people worked. We focused more on work output than number of hours a given person worked.



What did matter to me:




Be explicit when you’re working and when you’re not



Let us know in Slack ahead of time if you’re gone during your normal working hours



Let us know when you’re back



Try hard to avoid scheduling personal commitments during important meetings, marketing campaign launches, deployments, etc




We tried to communicate asynchronously as much as possible, but we were definitely a hybrid communication culture. We had plenty of real time conversations over Slack and a decent number of meetings to move things forward. So it was important that we knew when people were out.



People would often have a child’s sports game or a pet’s vet appointment, or even a yoga class near the end of their normal day – 3 or 4pm, or 2pm on a Friday. I’d tell them, “If you’re done with your work, don’t feel the need to come back for our sake! Enjoy the family time.”



And what I meant by this is: don’t be performative and act like you’re online afterwards if you’re really done for the day. It’s ok to call it. AND we’re not going to lower our expectations of what we need from you and when we need it. We trust you to manage your competing priorities and still get the work done.



But I wouldn’t say the part after the “Enjoy the family time.” So we had a very family friendly culture, but for new folks who didn’t understand the implied part, it could come across as lackadaisical when that wasn’t what I was trying to communicate at all.



Similarly, if someone had a loved one pass away, we wanted to create plenty of space for them to be with family and friends and grieve as they needed to. And we still had a business to run. So it was both:




Take all the time you need to grieve



Please make sure you either a) get your work done or b) make sure someone is handling the work for you




Now that might look like their manager saying, “Hey, we want you to be able to take all the time you need. I just need 30 minutes of your time to go over everything that’s on your plate so we can make sure it’s covered.” Or it might look like that person saying they still want to work to provide a distraction from nonstop grief. Both were ok, but what wasn’t ok was for work to fall on the floor and the company to suffer because they had something personal come up.



Looking back now I see how I could’ve more effectively communicated the fuller picture:




It’s important for work to occupy its proper place in your priorities as a family member, friend, and community member



We have priorities and goals here and we’re not going to lower our standard on those



We trust you to strike the right balance and raise your hand when you need help; otherwise we’ll expect quality work delivered on time like normal




Someone can be at every one of their kids’ baseball games or have a daily yoga practice AND deliver a high quality of work at a speed that helps us hit our goals. But as the leader you have to set that as the expectation. 



The same applies to every other element of the standard at your company. It has to be explicit and it has to be repeated. 



Maintain the Standard



Then there’s a set of mechanisms for enforcing the standard. The classic ones are performance reviews, performance improvement plans, firing people, bonuses, raises, and promotions.



These are all formal, top-down mechanisms. They don’t inform the culture in the way that informal, peer-to-peer mechanisms do.



Informal, peer-to-peer habits and practices are things that answer questions like:




When someone goes so far above and beyond what anyone could possibly consider their “job” and produces an exceptional collective outcome – how are they rewarded and recognized by the team? By leadership?



When someone steps up for a risky project that leadership dreamed up, with low likelihood of success, but high potential business impact – what happens to that person when the project fails to produce results? Are they celebrated? Managed out? 



When the company wins or loses a key account, how do people respond? Does anyone notice? Is it celebrated? How seriously do people take it? Do people pool their effort to make sure the momentum either corrects or continues?



When a manager says they need resources to hit their goals… Does leadership trust them and give them what they ask for? Are they allowed to risk making a mistake? If they mismanage the resources are they let go or otherwise formally held accountable? Or is it there an informal process where peers help that manager learn from the mistake and do better next time?



When you’re relying on a teammate for a project deliverable and they choose to prioritize going to a concert with a friend or taking their planned vacation while missing a deadline: how do you respond?



When someone’s loved one dies and they are going through grief, how does the team respond? What is that person responsible for? How do people step up to help, if at all?




These are often amorphous but when you see them you recognize them. In a sentence: how do people on your team hold each other accountable to the standard?



An Example from ConvertKit



I previously wrote about a mistake I made on my first official day as COO. We had been losing large accounts for months and many of those losses were for avoidable reasons. Creators were running into problems in the product. The support team was taking too long to get back to them. We weren’t reading into the question behind the question when we did get back to them. 



I was frustrated. This wasn’t the standard I had in mind. So I called an impromptu meeting 15 minutes after the account cancelled. I analyzed the situation live on the call, including indirectly calling out the person responsible. Then I urged the team that we needed to fix this going forward if we wanted to grow.



While I wrote about this as a mistake, it was only a mistake in method and delivery — it was too impulsive and jarring, so it didn’t achieve the goal. It was not a mistake in that the core message was a reflection of the standard I thought we needed to meet in order to reach our goals. 



We had become too flippant in our care for customers. We implicitly treated key accounts as if they were expendable. Losing a big account hurt MRR, sure, but more importantly it took away the halo effect that creator gave our brand. “Logos” are what matter in enterprise SaaS, but in the creator economy what matters is having big name creators who use, love, and recommend your tool. 



Creators aren’t doing weighted average decision making on which tools to use. They (mostly) don’t do multiple demos of competing products. Instead, they take a shortcut and use what the creators they respect use. 



I wanted to see more fire from the team. “Shit, we lost ANOTHER key account! We can’t keep doing this. We gotta pick it up. Here’s a Basecamp post on what I think is going on. Support team, let’s meet on Monday to talk about what we can do. Product, have someone sit in on the support meeting so we can start crushing some of these bugs that are causing frustration.”



And then a product peer jumping in to add what they’re seeing. Making the case for a bug smash sprint in the next dev cycle. Someone asking for more hires in exchange for accountability to solve the problem.



As a leader it’s not enough to set a standard one time and then bristle when the team falls short. You have to find ways to communicate and instill the standard in the culture at every level. Nothing is more powerful than peers calling each other to a higher level. Find ways to make that happen in addition to the formal, top-down mechanisms for accountability and rewards.



Encourage Trusting Relationships



The thing that enables this type of feedback and expectation at the peer level is the quality of the relationships. Trust is at the core of any quality relationship. Without it, none of the other stuff matters. Teams fall apart in the absence of trust.



That’s why I summed up culture as coming down to relationships on Twitter:




Company culture, boiled down to its essence, is the degree to which relationships translate into progress.— Barrett Brooks (@BarrettABrooks) August 17, 2023




You can have the best mission and vision in the world. The clearest standards. The best mechanisms for accountability and recognition on paper. But if people don’t trust one another, or worse, if they actively mistrust each other, then your company will fail. If it doesn’t fail, it will be miserable to work within. 



Machiavellian cultures are examples of this. Passive aggressive cultures are examples of this. Mediocre cultures within flatlined companies are examples of this. Perhaps the worst example of all is what Kim Scott calls a culture of “ruinous empathy” where everyone is running around trying to care for one another and letting the standard fly out the door in the process.



You can have high quality, caring relationships AND set a high standard for how you do things. You can care for one another and expect people to do the best work of their lives. You can fire people and want the right people to work at your company for the next decade.



Kim Scott is the standard bearer for what it means to build trusting relationships at work. She talks about this in two dimensions in her excellent book, Radical Candor:




Care personally



Challenge directly




“Challenge directly” is what it takes for peers to hold each other accountable to the standard. The most important piece you can control as a leader when it comes to directness is whether you both accept and give – even insist on – bidirectional directness.



People are more likely to embrace this when they know you care about them, their peers care about them, and when they commit to caring for you. It’s your job as the leader of the org to create opportunities and rituals for people to get to know each other personally. 



An Example from ConvertKit



I’ll write a dedicated essay in this series to cover the many habits and rituals we used to build trusting relationships at ConvertKit. Here I’ll give two quick examples of those rituals:



First, we held bi-annual team retreats. As a fully remote team from day one, retreats were our opportunity to bring everyone together and create deeper connections to the mission, vision, and to each other. The entire retreat was designed to deepen trust and care within the team.



When I led marketing, I  made a habit of using one of our retreat breakout sessions to share our personal stories. I prepped the team ahead of time with a simple prompt: “What are the three pivotal moments of your life or career that have shaped the person or professional you have become today?” 



Each person got 10-15 minutes to share. People were able to choose how personal they wanted to make it. Some kept it focused on their work. Some shared stories from their personal lives. Everyone listened intently and with care.



We sat around for hours listening to each other’s stories. People cried. They laughed. There was a round of hugs at the end. And that conversation was a pivotal moment in our ability to function as a high performing team. Now we really knew the people on the other end of the Slack messages.



—



When I got to ConvertKit, there were only about 20 people on the team. Every time someone new joined, they were able to have a 1:1 with every other person on the team to get to know them. As we grew past 30 people and certainly once we passed 50 people, that wasn’t possible anymore. 



We needed a new way for people to know who they were working with that didn’t involve 50 1:1s. Instead we started an internal podcast. We asked each person on the team to pick a colleague they’d most like to have interview them. We provided a sample set of potential questions, similar to what StoryCorps does with their interview kit. We setup a private podcast feed. And then we said “go for it.”



The internal-ears-only show turned out great. People had fun with it. Being interviewed by a colleague made each person feel seen and understood. And it gave teammates a thoughtful way to connect with each other while doing dishes, working out, or whatever else folks do while listening to podcasts.



People who trust each other more work harder for one another. They hold each other accountable and deliver real feedback. They perform at a higher level and work harder to reach their potential. 



Building trusting relationships is an imperative if you want to grow your company. 



Culture Shapes Performance More than Talent



And so I reiterate my original point. Culture shapes performance more than talent. 



Yes, talent matters. But if you surround an A-Player with a team of B- and C-players and they will regress to the mean of their team. Even the most talented people rise to or succumb to the standard they’re surrounded by. 



Culture is a mix of four things in my experience:




Mission and vision – make it clear, make it ambitious, and make it matter



The standard – the mix of habits, expectations, and norms that form the “people like us do things like this” at your company



Accountability to the standard – the formal, top-down methods of reward and punishment, but more importantly the informal, peer-to-peer mechanisms for upholding the standard



Trusting relationships – the rituals and opportunities you create for your team to get to know each other on a caring, personal level; this is what unlocks the ability for your team to fulfill the mission, set the standard, and hold each other accountable to it over time




Go get the best people you can. Then work like hell to create a culture where they can do the best work of their lives. I won’t guarantee you’ll make it, but I’d bet on you over someone ignoring culture altogether.







If you enjoyed this essay, subscribe below to get more like this in your inbox. I also send a weekly newsletter with a book recommendation, three exceptional essays from across the web, and a mini essay from me. I also make a weekly long-form interview podcast called Good Work, where I interview exceptional founders, scientists, authors, adventurers and more on how they became capable of and committed to using their careers to make the world a better place. 



Featured Photo by Aneta Hartmannová on Unsplash

			
