In 2012, we hit 100 employees. We were expecting to grow exponentially in the next few years. How do we preserve our culture?

“The easiest way to solve a problem is to avoid having it in the first place” - (tbh, I made that up)

We had two initial defenses against the dreaded culture shift that inevitably happens as a company grows. The first was our culture interview. The second was our onboarding process which I’ll cover in a separate post.

The culture interview enabled candidates to understand values that Medallians share, and lets us see how a candidate aligns with those values. The process was by no means perfected, but we improved over iterations and ended up with something like the following:

1. Every hire across the company (whether C-level or not) must go through a culture interview by a member from a different department
2. A no from a culture interviewer is a hard no

The first requirement helped avoid biases that e.g. an engineer would have for another engineer. The second requirement came into place because without that rule, hiring managers would often second-guess a culture interviewer’s feedback or try to negotiate on an already subjective matter. That second rule gave our culture interviewers quite a lot of power though, so only our “best” people that exemplified Medallia’s culture were allowed into the pool of interviewers.

Interview Process

The interview itself was a one hour conversation with an evaluation form at the end. The typical flow walked through a candidate’s life story in his or her own words with occasional prompts and questions by the interviewer. The purpose was to understand a person’s most pivotal decisions, typically made when facing challenges and conflict and try to understand their motivations, beliefs, and learnings as they relate to our values.

Cultural Values

How do we define our culture? In my opinion, a bad culture is one where people have an “unhappy departure” when they quit.

People may move on for numerous reasons like desiring a change of work, or finding better opportunities, or family/personal reasons. But if somebody leaves Medallia because they felt they did not fit in, or they felt unempowered, or they were not treated fairly; then those I attribute these to culture. Scores of close colleagues have left Medallia unhappily and all of them tie back in some way to at least one of the following values. This proves to me that they are a fair representation of the culture that I wanted at Medallia.

In no particular order, our cultural values are:

• growth mindset
• smarts
• values others
• intrinsic motivation
• ownership

For each value, I’ll describe it’s definition, why we believe it important to culture, and signs of its presence or absence:

Growth Mindset

Growth mindset is the belief that abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. It is the recognition that people (including him or herself) can change. For more info on growth mindset, please read Carol Dweck’s book.

People that show a fixed mindset are unable to recognize growth in others. For example, an engineer who is frustrated with a manager will not acknowledge that the manager can learn from feedback and may decide that voicing his or her opinion isn’t worth the effort at all. Instead they slowly get more and more frustrated at circumstances until they leave unhappily. The same can hold true for ones belief about co-workers, other teams, or even leadership.

Most candidates find it wasy to describe personal struggle and their ability to overcome it through effort by adapting or learning. Detecting whether one recognizes growth in others can come across easily through examples of mentorship, or helping co-workers. Examples of fixed mindset can come through in anecdotes of others, e.g. describing a co-worker who “will never change”. Note that believing that you alone can not change somebody’s opinion is not the same as believing that person’s opinion can never be changed, which leads us to the next value.

Smarts

Instead of IQ or EQ, smarts here refers to creativity/resourcefulness and a drive to learn from mistakes.

We value people that apply creativity in problem solving and anticipate problems. Would you want to work with somebody who never learned from their mistakes? What about somebody who doesn’t carefully consider possible solutions when faced with a major challenge?

Sensing a lack of smarts requires finding behavioral patterns across a person’s career. It’s okay if a candidate chose his first job because it “felt right”, but if they left unhappily and then chose a second job immediately for the same reason; I consider this a repeated mistake.

Values Others

Valuing others is the ability to trust others.

This is pretty crucial to any culture, but it is more important for those interviewing for people manager or client-facing roles.

This one comes across easily for me when asking for examples of team failures or personal conflict. When a team fails, do you blame the leader or individuals that didn’t contribute enough? Do you portray yourself as the victim of circumstances? If you disagree with your manager’s decision, do you simply walk away believing they are wrong and you are right? Do you strive to better understand their perspective and priorities? Do you attempt to compromise? Is it worth the effort? Disparaging remarks about groups of people are a massive red flag. For example, “everybody on our team hit the deadlines perfectly, but those contractors never finish on time”.

Intrinsic Motivation

This is motivation driven by internal rewards, e.g. a sense of personal responsibility or satisfaction as opposed to external motivations like salary and bonuses.

The idea is that people should have some form of intrinsic motivation with regards to their job. If the only reason you go to work is to get paid, then you will put in minimal effort to maximize the amount of money you make and leave immediately the moment a better opportunity comes along. People that are overly focused on salaries tend to be more competitive than cooperative with their coworkers.

This value is easy so long as a candidate expresses passion for something in their work, whether it’s a developer’s love for perfect documentation or a manager’s joy at promoting people. The trick is to ask this question indirectly. If I ask “what do you love about your work?”, then you may get less than honest responses.

Ownership

Ownership is the ability to admit and take responsibility for failures.

This is tied to humility and courage. People that are too proud to admit failure can cause so many issues in an organization. I’ve seen engineering managers that paint a beautiful rosy success story about their last major project, despite the fact that their team stays up fixing late night on-fire emergencies on it three times a week. People that recognize such failures and do nothing about them is just as bad!

Obvious signs of lack of ownership are people that simply blame the environment or others for missed deadlines. People that refuse to give feedback because “somebody else should have complained”.

The Art of the Culture Interview

Much of this interview is simply listening to what a candidate says. If you prompt them directly with questions like “Do you take ownership in the face of failure”, then of course people will say “yes” and tell a lovely faerie tale. The trick to this interview is truly in asking indirect questions to tease out a person’s mindset.

For similar reasons, try not to stray too far into hypothetical situations; which makes it very hard to judge a person’s potential.

Interview Evaluation

Much of the evaluation is subjective, so what we look for are patterns in the stories that people tell. It takes more than one instance of blaming somebody else for a project failure to call out victim mindset, but if it happens three times at different stages of a person’s career, then it’s much more likely that we have an issue.

Most of the values were often connected to each other. For example, people that demonstrate fixed mindset about others often do not value others either. The final yes/no decision itself was up to the interviewer. We resisted trying to weigh each value or place a fixed pass/fail threshold. Often times, certain values are more important for particular roles, e.g. a member of the sales team may have more extrinsic motivations due to the way quotas and bonus structures work. On rare occasions, when truly unsure of what decision to make, our responsibility was to bring up the red flags to the hiring manager and allow them to accept or reject the risk.

I often spend several hours deliberating on a candidate who exhibits amazing cultural values but also revealed a few red flag behaviors. Judging whether somebody will find success in an organization with only an hour’s worth of discussion is non-trivial.

Challenges

Challenges were plentiful when conducting this type of interview.

Messaging around “culture fit” or “assessment” tends to make people fear that they are judged according to a hard scale or rubric. Positioning the interview as a dialogue was key to avoiding stress and tension.

The private nature of this conversation itself caused a lot of issues. Some people are naturally closed about their past. Some people are naturally less introspective about their past decisions and learnings. Opportunities to shadow or record these discussions were rare since people are naturally less forthcoming when sharing to two people instead of one. This made it very difficult to achieve a consistent candidate experience.

Is that hesitation a reluctance to speak honestly? Perhaps a lack of confidence hinting at imposter syndrome?

In addition, everybody faces different challenges in life. If a candidate never faced conflict in the form of incompetent coworkers or bad managers, then it’s hard to foresee how they would handle it later.

Having a growth mindset about our candidates themselves means that we believe they too can learn these values. Was it fair to say that a candidate who doesn’t exhibit ownership can’t learn to do so? Context helped in setting expectations. A fresh college graduate with no experience can be forgiven and expected to learn ways to express valuing others. A senior manager with two decades of experience leading others should probably be able to convey that they care about people as they describe their career path.

Summary

There are tons of little tricks, flags, and patterns that one recognizes once they do enough of these character-based culture interviews. My takeaways are:

• It’s not about the story itself, it’s about how a candidate describe the conflicts, the characters, and their motivations
  • Do they always play the victim or the hero?
• Defining values is hard
  • Homogeneity is not the goal, diversity is necessary!
  • Culture will naturally evolve over time as organizations grow

Was the cultural interview effective at preventing less “unhappy departures”? It’s truly difficult to objectively measure this, but part of my interview includes an explanation of why we do it, and honesty about what types of challenges one may face at Medallia. I like to think that it informs people of tools that they already have and can use to succeed.