The best way to share and embed cultural DNA is person to person. When youâre growing fast, the new people you just hired most likely have some responsibility to hire as well, so a week of orientation isnât going to cut it.
If you have fifty people who understand your culture and add a hundred who donât, you will lose that culture. Itâs just math.
So when bringing in new employeesâespecially execsâyou shouldnât just throw them in the deep end, hand them a branded company notebook, and think youâre done. The first month or two are crucial and should be a period of positive micromanagement. Donât worry about getting too in the weeds or not giving them enough freedom. Not at first. A brand-new person needs all the help they can get to become really well integrated. Explain how you do things in detail so they donât make mistakes and alienate the rest of the team right off the bat. Talk to them about whatâs working and what isnât, what you would do in their position, whatâs encouraged and whatâs verboten, who to ask for help and who to treat with kid gloves.
Thatâs the best way to immerse someone in the culture, style, and processes of a team. Give them the push they need to start running with the pack rather than leaving them standing on the starting line, reading some docs, hoping theyâll catch up.
Always remember that itâs scary joining a new team. Not knowing anyone. Not knowing if youâll fit in. Not knowing if youâll succeed.
Thatâs why I started doing brown-bag lunches with the CEO. Matt did them too. Every two to four weeks, weâd gather a crew of 15â25 new hires and existing employees and have an informal lunch. We tried to cross-pollinate different people from different groups, a good mix from around the company. No managers, no executives, no keynote presentations. Just an
opportunity for them to get to know the bogeyman at the top and for me to get to know them. They asked me about our products, our policies, about me and Matt and our history at Apple. About why we didnât allow massages, about why we had so many code names. [See also: Chapter 6.4: Fuck Massages.] And I asked about what they were excited about, what they were working on, why they joined.
It was my chance to highlight why their role was important, to talk about how their teamâs goals powered our company goals, about our culture and our products and new projects and what was going right and what wasnât. New employees had the chance to come directly to me with their questions as well as meet existing employees who were already steeped in our culture, who could help them and lead by example.
Any employee could come to five lunches a year. And each lunch was a cultural inoculation, a vaccine against indifference and apathy, against thinking that what you do doesnât matter and that nobody at the top knows who you are.