Why you shouldn’t delegate culture
Or why you shouldn't hire a "Head" or "Chief" of culture, when it should really belong to everyone.
Last week, I heard about a newly-filled role at a friend’s start-up: Head of Culture. While this isn’t the first job of its kind, it is quite rare to see it filled in an early stage company, in a small team, when there’s simply so much to do and few people to do it.
And while (based on the rest of the content here) you might think I’m about to make the case for why this should be an early hire at every start-up, I’m not, and I want to go deeper on this specific role for just a moment to explain why.
This Head of Culture is chiefly responsible for 1) booking social events for the team and 2) writing job descriptions. These responsibilities are actually a perfect microcosm for why I don’t think a “Head of Culture” role is right for most companies in most moments. Specifically:
Culture is not social events (ask any Zoom happy hour) and writing job descriptions should be a hiring manager responsibility (there might be a boilerplate “culture” paragraph, but the hiring manager must own the JD)
Delegating culture to one person means no one else has to think about it
Because the remit is so vague, the person in this role will end up catching many, many responsibilities, few of which actually drive culture forward (Remember: Culture is the “how” of how you work, all day every day; it’s an input to higher output, retention, better business outcomes)
Let’s unpack that last one. Go with me for a second in this thought experiment. Whether you’re a founder, a manager, an executive, or an IC, and no matter what size your company…
Imagine that you had the open headcount and the decision-making authority to hire a Head of Culture. What responsibilities would you outline on the job description? What would you direct them to do first?
Now, put yourself in the shoes of someone you know who cares deeply about culture–maybe a passionate manager, a founder you’ve worked with, your mentor who still talks about Jack Welch and GE’s legendary culture. What would they put in that job description?
Finally, think about the person you’ve consistently seen roll their eyes at these conversations, always eager to get back to the “what” and spend as little time on the “how” as humanly possible. What would that person put in that job description?
You get the idea: Culture is broad and squishy enough that all this hypothetical role runs the risk, wherever it is, of being defined by the priorities and preconceptions of the person shaping the role, rather than what the organization actually needs, or where it is in its journey.
So conversely, when would this role make sense for a company? Tl;dr, when it’s…
Staffed enough that there is actually an HR team to handle HR tasks (e.g., a Workplace team for social events, a Talent team for job description support)
Sophisticated enough in its internal conversation about culture that the person in this role can convene tough, exec-level conversations to create alignment
But even then, I’m not sure that a Head of Culture is the best use of a headcount (especially a senior one), because when Culture is one person’s job, it easily becomes no one else’s job.
There’s a refrain many of us have heard from teams dedicated to company infrastructure: “[X] is our collective responsibility. It’s the job of every person at this company to support and and focus on [X].” Security teams know that their best efforts often depend on those of us far outside the team not clicking on that convincing phishing email. Compliance teams can only do so much without vigilance from employees across the enterprise. Culture is the same. By its very definition, the more culture is the responsibility of a single person or even a single team, the more likely this work is to fail. This is probably especially true because of the “HR tax”—the near-automatic discounting of efforts originating from HR teams because of that point of origin.
There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, and powerful teams of culture keepers (though I will say I don’t know of a single example among these rarities that self-describes as the “culture team”). The take-home here is that the closer a company can get itself to a reality where every employee truly considers themself a shaper and keeper of culture (the “how” as much as the “what”), the more strong, consistent, and distinct that culture will be, and the more engagement employees will derive from being connected to it.
How much of your energy do you dedicate to developing culture? What daily rituals, behaviors and common beliefs have you put in motion for the team you lead?