The best way to share and embed cultural DNA is person to person. When you’re growing fast, the new people you just hired most likely have some responsibility to hire as well, so a week of orientation isn’t going to cut it.

If you have fifty people who understand your culture and add a hundred who don’t, you will lose that culture. It’s just math.

So when bringing in new employees—especially execs—you shouldn’t just throw them in the deep end, hand them a branded company notebook, and think you’re done. The first month or two are crucial and should be a period of positive micromanagement. Don’t 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 don’t make mistakes and alienate the rest of the team right off the bat. Talk to them about what’s working and what isn’t, what you would do in their position, what’s encouraged and what’s verboten, who to ask for help and who to treat with kid gloves.

That’s 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 they’ll catch up.

Always remember that it’s scary joining a new team. Not knowing anyone. Not knowing if you’ll fit in. Not knowing if you’ll succeed.

That’s why I started doing brown-bag lunches with the CEO. Matt did them too. Every two to four weeks, we’d gather a crew of 15–25 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 didn’t 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 team’s goals powered our company goals, about our culture and our products and new projects and what was going right and what wasn’t. 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 doesn’t matter and that nobody at the top knows who you are.

We don’t always realize it, but what we do and how we do it are themselves pitches. We’re conveying a message about ourselves, our work, or our organization—and other people are interpreting it.

Take some time to find out what they think you’re saying. Recruit ten people—a combination of coworkers and friends and family. Then ask them which three words come to mind in response to one of these questions: What is my company about? What is my product or service about? What am I about? Make it clear that you’re not asking them for physical qualities (“tall, dark, and handsome”) but something deeper.

Once you gather these words, look for patterns. Many people are surprised by the disconnect between what they think they’re conveying and what others are actually hearing. Knowing is the prelude to improving.

How did Commerce handle selection? The bank literally needed fifteen seconds in an interview to know if someone would be a good fit. Within fifteen seconds, the Commerce interviewer could tell if prospective employees smiled in a resting state. Commerce Bank understood that most of us smile when provoked, but we spend most of our day with a more neutral or even negative expression on our face. A subset of human beings, however smiles as a default position. Since an eight-hour day at Commerce required eight hours of smiling, the company looked for people with this "smiley gene." Of course, first the bank had to get these happy people into the job interview. Commerce Bank decided to leverage its best asset for this task: a payroll already filled with happy people. Like any tribe, smilers are great at recognizing themselves in other people. And so Commerce distributed handfuls of laminated cards to new employees with a printed message inviting people to join the Commerce family. Itthen instructed new hires to hand out a card to anyone who gave them a great service experience. Literally anyone. Commerce told them — whether it was a great toll booth operator or librarian or convenience store cashier. With one exception — no one in the financial services industry, including another re- tail bank. The effort it took to deprogram these employees was too high, and they were likely to be too expensive, given the aptitude requirements of most banks and brokerages.

How did Commerce handle selection? The bank literally needed fifteen seconds in an interview to know if someone would be a good fit. Within fifteen seconds, the Commerce interviewer could tell if prospective employees smiled in a resting state. Commerce Bank understood that most of us smile when provoked, but we spend most of our day with a more neutral or even negative expression on our face. A subset of human beings, however smiles as a default position. Since an eight-hour day at Commerce required eight hours of smiling, the company looked for people with this "smiley gene." Of course, first the bank had to get these happy people into the job interview. Commerce Bank decided to leverage its best asset for this task: a payroll already filled with happy people. Like any tribe, smilers are great at recognizing themselves in other people. And so Commerce distributed handfuls of laminated cards to new employees with a printed message inviting people to join the Commerce family. Itthen instructed new hires to hand out a card to anyone who gave them a great service experience. Literally anyone. Commerce told them — whether it was a great toll booth operator or librarian or convenience store cashier. With one exception — no one in the financial services industry, including another re- tail bank. The effort it took to deprogram these employees was too high, and they were likely to be too expensive, given the aptitude requirements of most banks and brokerages.

At Commerce Bank, if you recall, within the first ninety seconds, new hires learn that they (1) are part of a crazy tribe of congenitally happy people, (2) have a responsibility to go find others like them, and (3) must answer the phone with an attitude of "Wow!" In these three simple gestures, clocking in at less than two minutes, employees internalize what matters to the company. The firms that hand out binders in the first ninety seconds of orientation — what have they communicated as being important? The bureaucracy? Companies that really get it start the imprinting process in the recruiting phase. At this point, of course, it's part communication and part alignment. You want to identify people who are likely to be good cultural fits, but you also want to start making it clear what you're all about.