Feedback Culture

A Practical Guide to Tying Feedback to Culture

These are the lessons about culture that I wish I knew before founding my startup…

I’m almost embarrassed writing this because there are a billion other articles on culture, each expressing some truism, or unique point of view that only fits one business. My hope is I tackle culture from a different angle and provide some tactical practical tools to build great culture through feedback.

Culture is much more a reflection on the actions of your team, rather than hollow slogans echoed by management.

When I first joined Google, I was inundated with these slogans. Recruiters sold me on the now defunct idea of “20% time”. They said it was permissible, if not actively encouraged, to spend 20% of your time pursuing projects outside your core function. It's bottoms up, engineering-focused culture, reminiscent of their early days when Paul Buchheit built Gmail.

The only problem was, in practice, it no longer existed. 20% time was the fastest way to wind up sipping slushies on the roof of the Mountain View offices, condemned to resting, vesting, and never getting promoted.

It didn’t matter if Google talked big about 20% time, if in reality, managers and directors didn’t support it. Because culture is only affected by action – principally firing, promoting, and hiring.

Firing’s effect on culture is obvious through its absence. Employees that don't pull their weight, that skirt around or hack commonly held values, bring the company's culture down to their level. Like the Peter Principle, your culture is only as good as its worst adherent. If a hacker finds a way to manipulate cultural mores without getting fired, surely more will follow in their footsteps.

Promotion, while not instantly apparent, can be much more subversive when the wrong person gets promoted or the right person doesn't. The most hard-working Googliest person I knew took five years to get promoted, while the more politically astute were jumping the line, avoiding hard problems, and building flashy Potemkin projects for that big promotion before hopping to the next team.

Hiring has instant ramifications, because if you don’t address cultural problems quickly, they proliferate like interns. And while Google hid its squishy cultural underbelly internally, externally, its hiring practices were quite strong. Tough, stringent, unbiased interviews with a penchant for saying no.

So how did Google end up like this – hiring some of the brightest minds out of college and sloughing them off due to cultural malpractice? Fundamentally, they had a misapprehension about the nature of culture. If culture primarily is used in firing, promoting, and hiring, then build it that way. When appropriately used, people understand that culture matters, it's not just page three, section four of some contract recruiter's playbook.

We took this to heart at StartPlaying (SPG). Our cultural values are written in a management framework. We show the gradations of each cultural value so that managers can understand how to give feedback and employees can understand how to improve and get promoted.

We also ensure every piece of feedback is tied to an appropriate cultural value. Feedback directly affects performance reviews and JDs, which directly affects whether you're fired, promoted or hired. This practice links culture to those three most important events to an employee.

In onboarding, we focus on addressing cultural problems quickly. Each week, we write down feedback for the new hire, either positive or negative, and tie it directly to a cultural value. That way, they see that we take culture seriously.

We not only make our feedback early, we make it often, because without it, problems proliferate. This is human nature. The first time you jump into a Waymo, you almost go into cardiac arrest. (There’s nobody driving!) But if you acclimate yourself to it, if you get feedback each week, it becomes the norm.

Below is how we specifically gave feedback. I plotted all the feedback I gave for a given year, marking both positive and negative.

Notice that more than 50% of the feedback was positive, reinforcing “Great” cultural behavior.

Next are the cultural values I tied to feedback.

I consistently gave feedback on ownership, the most important cultural value at SPG, not only in name, but in practice. Because I tied culture to feedback, teammates spoke about ownership in meetings, it became part of the SPG parlance, and manifested in action.

Finally, I've included a word cloud of all the feedback I gave that year. One aspect to notice is how positive these words are. Only if you squint, can you see the word mistake written in tiny letters on the bottom of the cloud.

We use a template to make feedback specific, actionable, and demonstrating impact (how an action changed a project's trajectory).

In the future, I'm sure that we will wrap this in a GPT, so when managers give feedback, the system gives them feedback on their feedback immediately (feedback feedback) and ensures that it conforms to SPG’s values.

Finally, I've included a sample of our cultural values below. This is actually what we use. It's specifically built so it's easy to grade the feedback on a bad, good, or great scale. (Even in looking at it now, I imagine it would be incredibly useful to plug this into a GPT to help managers classify and grade their feedback!)

I had to build this system painfully and iteratively, stumbling across each mistake before finding solutions. Because when I looked to see how culture is practically implemented, I couldn't find a resource. There were high-level examples and plenty of tips on building out monosyllabic cultural values, but very little on actual implementation.

It’s scary and embarrassing to show concretely what you do, an easy way to garner criticism. (It's hard to criticize the ideal of 20% time, but very easy to criticize the implementation.) But I'm glad I did write this. Hopefully in overcoming that initial embarrassment, and writing something down that’s concrete, I can share what's worked for me, and you can avoid those all too painful learnings.