1/ Ask a leader to describe their culture and you'll get the positives.
Ask them to describe the cost they're willing to pay for that culture and you'll often get silence.
Culture embodies trade-offs. If you can't name the con that comes with the pro, you don't fully understand the culture you've chosen.
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6/ Most leaders describe their culture's strengths. The ones who actually understand it can tell you what it costs.
Thanks to @molly_g for the conversation on the WorkLife podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cwt_rMXOoU&list=PLAWu34VO7OtJTX1ycOMYsMbkhslhWv-OE
5/ That moment probably saved us hours. But more than that, it proved the culture was real.
Psychological safety isn't a soft concept. It's how you win, because no one is sitting on the fix, too afraid to speak up.
2/ At Meta, we built around iteration speed. The line everyone quotes was actually shortened.
The real phrase was "move fast and don't be afraid to break things."
The goal was never to break things. The goal was learning rate.
1/ Ask a leader to describe their culture and you'll get the positives.
Ask them to describe the cost they're willing to pay for that culture and you'll often get silence.
Culture embodies trade-offs. If you can't name the con that comes with the pro, you don't fully understand the culture you've chosen.
5/ That moment probably saved us hours. But more than that, it proved the culture was real.
Psychological safety isn't a soft concept. It's how you win, because no one is sitting on the fix, too afraid to speak up.
4/ One story stays with me. Major site outage. Millions of dollars a minute, the whole team scrambling.
Mid-chaos, an engineer linked to a diff and said: "I think it might be this." It was their own change.
That only happens when you already know what comes next isn't blame. It's "thank you, you just got us back up faster."
3/ But here's what actually made it work: when something broke, we didn't ask "who did this?"
We asked "why was this even possible, and how do we make it impossible going forward?"
That's a learning culture, not a blame culture.
