Do what you want mirrored

As someone with any sort of influence in a company, whether you’re a founder, executive, manager, influential employee, or anything in between, all your actions have a second order effect: reinforcing what's culturally acceptable. Whenever you do something, you’re not just doing that thing. You’re also implicitly telling everyone around you: here in this company, it is okay or encouraged to do this thing, and this is the kind of thing you should expect to have happen going forward.

This works for both good and bad behaviors. If you exhibit intellectual curiosity and honesty in your work, insist on paying attention to details, or obsess over ways to create leverage for your team, you reinforce that this is the expectation. If you’re late for meetings, tolerate broken windows, or treat people poorly, you’re also saying it’s okay to do that.

This isn’t something any company can talk their way out of. Culture is what you do, not what you say. If you drag your feet on addressing performance issues, then no matter how often you say you have a team of A players, people will internalize that this is not a high performance culture. If you try to shortchange someone on comp, then regardless of how many times you say you care about retention, they’ll walk away thinking that they can’t trust your company to do right by them, which probably isn’t great for their engagement or retention.

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