Culture from the Ground Up
Originally posted on Celero Commerce
I look at company culture as something that happens organically. It’s not necessarily about creating a culture, but rather creating the room for culture to create itself. Most importantly, that means finding the right people. You need employees who are going to buy in wholeheartedly to your vision and contribute to something larger than themselves.
When I first came onboard at Celero, I was looking forward to the challenge of creating a company culture from scratch. Being a new organization, and especially one that has been formed with various disparate groups through acquisitions, creating a sense of culture is much harder. In some ways, you’re adopting culture; in other ways, you’re refreshing it or creating a new one. I’ve gotten the chance to watch as different groups have come together to navigate new waters.
I gravitated toward those challenges because I knew they would also bring a tremendous amount of opportunity. Work is a huge aspect of life, and the more you can make work be a parallel stream to the life you want to live, the better. I saw the opportunity to create that environment for myself and my team at Celero, and I couldn’t pass it up.
As I settled in and started to build the team I have today, culture was one of my top priorities. I asked myself, how can we build a culture that we all want to be a part of and contribute to? How can we avoid having one voice be the loudest voice in the room?
For my team, a highly collaborative culture is what works best. We do our best work in a climate of open and honest communication. But I believe that what works for us probably wouldn’t work as well for any other group, because it wouldn’t be genuine. In order to create a genuine culture, you have to factor in the individuals on your team. I think that’s what culture ultimately means: it’s the group of people you have at the moment, and whatever values they buy into.
