‘Build a good place to work’: why you should cultivate a positive culture

Starting your own business comes with the unique chance to build the type of company you want to work for - and a big part of that is the workplace culture and how you lead your team. Defining, building and sustaining a positive company culture is something worth investing in from the start.

We asked an expert with over 18 years of experience as a founder and leader - and who’s spoken at Turing Fest, been a guest on the SaaS Scaling Secrets podcast and recently sat down with Joe Leech on an episode of The Modern CEO Podcast - to share his advice for how to make that vision a reality. He also happens to be FreeAgent’s CEO. Roan Lavery founded FreeAgent in 2007 alongside Ed Molyneux and Olly Headey and right from the start, he tells us, building a great culture was a top priority.

Why do you think a positive company culture should be important to every business?

Fundamentally, what you get from having a good culture is happy, motivated, high-performing members of your team. So, they’re people who want to do their job - and do well in their job. You’re always going to get the most out of your organisation if it’s a place where people feel comfortable, welcome, relaxed and heard. They’ll also want to stay at the business and they’re probably recommending your company to other people as well, so there’s a recruitment perspective.

How did you start building a strong company culture?

Most people have worked in jobs where we didn’t like the company or didn’t like the culture. When you’re doing it for yourself, you can say, “Well, actually, we’ll fix that”. You get to build a company where it’s as good a place to work as possible.

Quite early on, when there were 10-12 people on the FreeAgent team, we got everybody in the business together and did these exercises to talk about the principles of what we wanted the organisation and the culture to be. Today, we have our value statements*, which we’ve worked on quite a lot. Back then, we were trying to find a way to articulate what we wanted the business to be.

‘The Advantage: Why Organisational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business’ by Patrick M Lencioni is a book we reference quite a lot at FreeAgent. It has some useful exercises about how you define your company culture. It talks about how to unearth what type of culture you are.

One of the interesting things that they suggest is: say you’ve got an organisation of 20-30 people, consider if there are people that you think epitomise what you think the culture should be. People you look at and think, “they’re amazing because they do this, this and this”. Then think about how you would describe that person. Effectively what you’re doing is describing the culture you want.

When we did that exercise, we talked about people in the organisation who we thought exhibited the personality or characteristics or traits that we really admired - people who exemplified what we wanted the FreeAgent company culture to be. Then we wrote those down and over time they evolved into the values that we have today.

*At FreeAgent, our company values: ‘own it - enjoy it - be proud of it’ are engrained in the way the team and company work - from how we treat one another to how we define priorities.

What are some other early considerations when defining a company’s culture?

How you work is actually a really overlooked part of company culture. For example, ask yourself: are you very data-driven as a company? Do you make decisions based on data or do you make decisions based on intuition, opinion or gut feeling? There isn’t a right or wrong answer, but different companies will flex those things.

It’s about how you work and how things get done… The key point is that culture is as much about your ways of working, your operating rhythm, the frameworks you use, and how you treat each on a day-to-day basis - then the values fit alongside that.

How do you think a company can stay true to its culture over time?

Early on in a company’s existence, the founders and the early employees are super important in terms of who defines a culture. But after a while, you’re not as important… It’s about the people you hire and people they hire and then the people they hire.

It’s so important that you know you’re able to hire the right people and instill the right culture within those people - because they’re the ones that are then going to hire other people and so on. If you’ve got people who really get the culture that you want to build an organisation and they make sure that they’re hiring for the right things, then you can do it.

At the same time, I think you need to constantly talk about culture - but it’s not about preaching. Think about how culture is embedded in the day-to-day and how it feels tangible to people. It has to feel integral. So think about how to weave it in. For example, at FreeAgent, our qualities, values and ways of working [the personal characteristics] are part of the career progression frameworks for every employee.

Then, think about how to bring the culture to life for your team, without it feeling heavy and another massive thing that people need to remember. As much as possible, it needs to feel easy and lightweight and integrated into the core of the business.

As the the CEO of a company that employs more than 250 people, what’s the standout lesson you’ve learned?

There’s a transition you go through - that I still struggle with to this day - that I think is really interesting. The transition from being a ‘maker’ to being a ‘manager’. After years of being hands-on, you transition to stepping back and having to still direct a company or a product, but doing it through other people. So how do you effectively transition from being somebody who is ‘making’ on a day-to-day basis to somebody who is succeeding through other people - building teams and coaching individuals?

There’s a really great analogy: you move from being a builder to a gardener. If you’re a gardener, you can’t make the plant grow right, but you can set the soil and make sure the conditions are right. You can water, you can have control of the environment - but you effectively have to let that garden grow and blossom on its own. That’s a longer process and involves being much more patient. You can’t always be as hands-on as you once were.

Are there any other leadership experiences you’d share?

The expectation that teams have full autonomy and individuals have full autonomy is a mantra of tech companies and how they work. There’s a lot of really good reasons for that because leaders shouldn’t be micromanaging or being involved in every decision - it’s not an efficient way of running a business. But the reality is that no one has true, full autonomy - myself included.

I don’t get to make all the decisions I want. Nobody in any organisation does. So that’s a little bit of a myth about everybody having full autonomy. It’s just about, how much autonomy do we have? What do we get to make decisions about and when do we have to consult and work with other people, and sometimes just take direction from other people?

In the past, I’ve encountered mismatches in expectations between what someone I managed thought was expected of them and what I expected of them - in terms of how much autonomy they had versus what my level of involvement was going to be.

A useful framework for delegating is the seven levels of delegation, which talks about these different levels that you can go through. The lowest level of delegation is: “I’m going to tell you exactly what to do and you just go and do it”. The opposite end is: “you just completely decide what you want to do and you don’t even need to tell me about it”.

It’s a really interesting framework for thinking about things because quite often the mistakes happen when there’s a misunderstanding of the level of delegation. So one person assumes it’s at one level where somebody else assumes it’s a level down. So you need to be really honest and open from the beginning.

What is the single most important thing you think every leader should be good at?

Emotional regulation. Your number one job as a leader is to not make things worse. So your number one rule should be to calm situations down, take the stress out of them and put people at ease.

Things happen - but also remember they’re not the end of the world. Help people to figure out how to move forward, that’s what really good leadership is.

There are some things that are really serious and maybe you should be getting upset about those. But by and large, on a day-to-day basis, they’re not that big of a deal. So, just chill out. The best piece of advice I can give to any CEO or leader is don’t get caught up in the small stuff.

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