CULTURE KILLERS: Special Treatment
Every founder wants their company to be known for its culture. Every employee wants to work in a place that they love. To succeed, every startup needs a Culture that Works.
Culture is so much more than a list of random perks. It results from how a company implements its strategy across its organization, how it runs its business every day, and how it manages its people. Culture is hard to build and fragile once established.
Around every corner is a CULTURE KILLER that can derail you and your company. In this series, we’re sharing some of our favorite examples and discussing the bigger underlying issues that are easily missed but must be fixed.
This Edition: Special Treatment
Every person is critical at an early stage company and every person can have outsized influence. If you don’t treat everyone equally, the consequences can be huge. In this edition of CULTURE KILLERS, we discuss how treating people differently - regardless of why - can quickly lead to business derailing problems.
There are many reasons why a member of a team could get Special Treatment. Anyone who has been in the workforce has probably seen it happen.
Sometimes, it is a high performer who gets Special Treatment. Let’s say a senior member of the team does great work and likes to go to an exercise class that ends a few minutes before a key meeting. The expectation is that people join on camera or in person, but they get a pass.
Sometimes, it is a low performer that is treated differently. Maybe they are a friend of a founder from way back when. Maybe they are related to an investor. Maybe they are so genuinely likable as a human that no one has the heart to tell them to do better. Or maybe they are simply a jerk who intimidates everyone. They are not pulling their weight, and it goes addressed.
Special Treatment can create real business problems. Projects do not get done, or they do not get done well - which wastes time and money. Other members of the team have to compensate, taking time away from their own priorities.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The real issues are the crippling effects on culture that lie beneath.
Resentment grows. It may not be visible at first, especially if the recipient of the Special Treatment is likable. But it is there and it is festering. It can kill morale.
Credibility decreases. People question leadership’s effectiveness, and their judgment.
Burn out increases. Strong players end up doing the work of multiple people. They know they are doing work that someone else is being paid to do, and that they are not being compensated for it.
Gossip skyrockets. Employees know when someone else is held to a different standard, and they talk about it. All the time, in every company we’ve ever seen.
Simply put, Special Treatment creates the ideal environment to create drama. Drama harms culture and builds politics. It does not matter if the Special Treatment is going to high or low performers. The cultural impact is devastating either way.
Special Treatment is also an easy problem to fix. It requires clear expectations - tied to a clear strategy - and the willingness to hold people to the same standards of accountability.
Just as one person getting Special Treatment can kill a startup’s culture, taking the right actions to course correct can make a huge difference overnight.
