 Alright, well we'll go ahead and get started, so good morning and welcome for joining this morning. I just want to say thanks for being here. I hope the morning's off to a good start and DrupalCon's off to a good up, more volume. Let's see what we can do. How's this? Any better? A lot better? Okay, there we go. I'm just saying good morning. So this title of the session is Cultures Curated. So we're going to talk a little bit about what we mean when we say the word culture, why this is important, and why improving the culture of our organizations is something we should care about as leaders. Before we start, I'll give you a quick intro about myself and Chromatic. So my name is Dave Look. I live in Chicago. I'm one of the three partners of Chromatic. My primary role as a partner is on the operations side, so I handle things like contracts, employee agreements, HR, things along those lines. I do like to do pretty much anything I can outside of work, so I'd love to be outside. I like to hunt fish camp, fly airplanes, drive jeeps, do team endurance challenges, kind of whatever I can to be outside. So that's just a little bit about me. As I mentioned, I'm one of the partners of Chromatic. We're a 10-year-old digital agency, primarily focusing on Drupal. We are an entirely distributed team, so I'll probably say this a couple times this morning. I don't think anything that I say doesn't apply to co-located teams, but we are entirely distributed. We have 12 team members, many of them are sitting right here, so thank you guys for being here. We have 10 people in the United States and two in Europe, so we do get to play the time zone game a little bit, and we have a wide range of clients that we've worked with over the years. So we spent a lot of time working with Meredith Publishing on shape.com, parents.com, my weddings.com, Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart weddings. We recently launched a subscription site for Adult Coloring Book, so you can log in and download pages and color them in. We've been working with Casper, the mattress company, to do front-end performance and AB testing. I couldn't tell you everything that we do for them. Brian is somewhere he could. We've worked with Outside Magazine. We help support their Drupal team and improve their website. And recently, we've been working with Knowledge and Sunglasses to do a front-end bruise on their V2C and V2B site. We have a long list of other clients. We've worked with State Farm, Data Mania, Hive Motion. So, yeah, that's just a little bit about chromatic. So the topic and the word of culture, I would have to say that as I wrote my session proposal, I didn't really realize the depth of this conversation. And obviously, I hadn't written the whole talk when I wrote my session proposal. So it's kind of been a fun journey to read articles and talk to our whole team about culture, what culture looks like. So I hope that you find this helpful this morning and definitely in the context of company culture and tech company culture. And as I said, we are distributed. So I do look at everything through the lens of being a distributed company. And I think there are some pros and cons of being co-located and do impact and influence your culture. So one thing that I did find is a fun fact was that in 2014, Miriam Webster said that the word culture was the word of the year. And in all the articles that are written about it, I couldn't really say why they chose the word culture to be the word of the year, other than that the search volume for the word culture had gone up exponentially. And really, if you do look around to try to define culture in and of itself, there are thousands and thousands of responses to that. So as I'm saying the word culture, I want you to just think about that word. And what is it, how does it make you feel when you hear me use the word culture? What do you associate the meaning of culture to be? When you think about in terms of good culture and bad culture, I took some time last week and I talked to every person on the chromatic team for 15 to 20 minutes about this and a handful of other questions that I would share their answers to. And I said this exactly in this way. How do you define culture? And I would say every person on the team either immediately responded with, oh, that's a really tough question, or a long pause as they thought about their answer. And I think that's true for all of us, as we do press into this word culture and the usage of it in context to business, it is something that stirs up different emotions because of how we use the word. And I don't have a degree in language, so I can't really explain all the lies of that. But I think our team put the definition of culture pretty well. So, man, I messed up my slides. I will get to that in a minute. But I said, Adam said the social norms of the group include communication, ethics, really millions of things. And he said that includes sarcasm levels. And I think what he meant by this was that our team has a unique culture in and of itself that we can joke with each other, we can be sarcastic, we can press into each other. And that's part of the culture that is part of our map. Gus said it's beliefs, traditions, values and a shared history. And I found the shared history piece to be really interesting because in terms of, there's all of these pieces that come into culture, but I think that one gets left out of a lot of the definitions. And there is a sense of, when somebody enters into the company, in this case, chromatic, they all of a sudden are associated to all of the shared history that we have and the culture that we've built up around. Gary included behaviors and beliefs, but he also added that it's hard to have a culture without, by yourself, that communities are required and you can't be strangers. And he also added that the behaviors are the outward expressions of culture, so what you see and what you hear. So the culture isn't just the phrase and the words and the way you talk about your values as a company, it is actually how you live it out. I'm going to go fast in this slide because I didn't give Claire a cool title. Claire said it's a contained group or demographic. I think we have to take a minute to talk about all of the different pairings of the word culture. So we have American culture and French culture and Estonian culture and religious culture, non-religious culture, company culture, art culture, dog culture, cat culture. There's negative cultures, we've heard the word rape culture, celebrity culture, young culture, all of these things throw up different emotions. So what culture are we even talking about when we're having this conversation? Mark said, I also didn't get a good face title for him, Mark said the concept of saying we don't have a culture, everyone can do whatever they want within the organization, is a culture in and of itself. So again, I don't want to overemphasize it, but it is difficult to determine what we actually are talking about and then why we care about this. Sebastian Junger, who is not a lot of work with PTSD and veterans returning home, wrote a book called Tribes and he said, we have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding or tribes. And this tribal connection has been largely lost in modern society, but regaining it might be his psychological survival. So he's making the case that this sense of belonging and the sense of being part of a small group is something that's being lost today and that is something we do need to care about on an individual level. I highly recommend the book, it's a very quick read, you can pick it up and read it on the airplane and going home. But I think it's this longing that we have at an individual level to have a sense of belonging in a group that makes us care about the culture of our organizations. And I think it's why as leaders or team members this is something that we should care about and we should try to improve. Lastly, I think it's at this kind of intersection of your personal values and the values of an organization where those things align is where you do start to feel that sense of belonging. So I mentioned this idea of we have beer on Fridays and that's something that people talk about when they talk about, oh we have a great company culture, we have beer on Fridays. But I have to challenge that a little bit with like why you have beer on Fridays. Did you grind everybody on the team to a pulp and the week sucked so bad that you have to drown out the feelings of the week with beer? Or is it really part of your team's core values of camaraderie, teamwork, celebration and are you coming together to celebrate and enjoy one another versus drown out those terrible things? As I said, we have to really define what we're talking about. So I think I already said this, but this morning we are going to talk about company culture and tech company culture or Drupal company culture. And obviously a lot of this is going to be biased toward problematic company culture. I took a little bit of time to try to define what I mean when I say culture. So I used a bit of what the team shared. So I said culture is a set of beliefs, traditions and values shared by a contained group. And that culture is manifested in the groups inward and outward actions as well as their shared history. And I think this is a little bit broader than a lot of the different dictionary definitions, but it doesn't conflict with any of them. I also think it's important that as we have this conversation, we talk about the things that culture is not. So culture isn't a means of exclusion. So it doesn't mean, oh, we built this culture or we have this shared history so you can't join it. So it's not an excuse to not hire someone. It's not something you can hide behind. You don't get to just say, this is our culture. So we can live one way internally and externally, we can say, this is the way we really are. It's not something you should be idle toward. I'm going to emphasize that over and over and over. And it's not a fancy word for retention. Culture is not your means of, yeah, keeping your team together. I also want to emphasize that culture isn't your demographic, but your demographic will have its own culture. We can see that across all of society. And those things are part of why you can have dog culture. So this is Chunk, my Boston Terrier. And any person that owns a dog has this shared sense of, I know a little bit about you because of our shared history of having a dog. And anybody that has a Boston Terrier also automatically knows a little bit of something about that other person. It's the same way men and women in the military can immediately associate with each other because they have a shared set of beliefs, values, shared history, a sense of camaraderie. I think this is why when you travel and you meet somebody from where you're from, we have an instant connection to them. So again, this is my definition. I hope you guys are tracking with me this morning. So I mentioned community, and I want to say this again. You can't have culture without community. It's difficult to have this as an individual. And this is why as business leaders, if you started an organization with just one person, you had this idea of what your organization looked like. And then you added in another person. And then maybe you ended up at five or 10 or 15 and you're kind of this accidental CEO. Well, you have to take a step back and define what culture looks like for your organization. If it's not something that you've kept out out in front. This is why when you go from 10 to 20, your culture changes from 20 to 50, and 50 to 100 and so on. That's where the title culture is curated came from. So this is where I emphasize this idea that we have to keep the concept of culture out in front. And we really have to be cognizant of the actions that are around our culture. So how do we cure culture? And I think this is a really simple concept. You find good culture and you increase it and you reduce bad culture. So that's it. Have a great day. Obviously, there's more to saying, you know, just increase the good and decrease the bad. We have to have to define what those things mean as well. And I think this is where it gets really complicated because you have to take into account the different people in your organization. You have to take into account the way you have been historically. And if this hasn't been something that you're keeping a pulse on, it can be really hard to realign cultural values for an organization. Mark also said when we were talking, the worst culture is a culture where part of the group holds to and believes something to be true or to be good culture, but the other half holds true to be bad culture. And I think his like at the underlying concept there is that there's inking gruity or people feeling on the outskirts of the group. So what is good culture? I asked this question to everyone on the team as well. And I found the answers to be interesting, especially when I share our team's core values. But I do think good culture is subjective. I have a great friend that works at JP Morgan Chase. And I'm betting he can't go into the office wearing a sweatshirt and dress sweatpants. You know, but I can. And that's part of our culture and who we are. And we have to take some time to map these things that we see as good culture to our values. And if we don't, we're going to see conflicts between individuals that have different values and different value alignments within the organization. So honesty, but not feeling like I have to share everything in my life. So I think the values that this maps to are things like openness, honesty, inclusion, trust. And many of those are going to be common throughout the responses to what is good culture. Feeling comfortable together, sharing and talking. So again, openness, vulnerability, trust, not feeling like you're going to be ostracized for the way you feel. Having inside jokes that aren't related to work. I think this is a sense of knowing one another and actually having a forum that isn't just writing code to relate to one another as part of the organization. All right. So Larry is pretty smart. And he explained to me this concept of code switching, which I would butcher. But the basic sense is that in different people groups, you might kind of change your personality or you might talk slightly differently with your parents versus with your coworkers versus with another group. He said good culture is when you don't have to code switch to integrate. So basically being able to be genuine and be able to be yourself in the group for your human respect. Positivity over negativity. So caring for one another. Not fostering things that are toxic in the organization. Willingness to openly ask for help. So again, trust, vulnerability, humility, openness is paired with this idea of openness to respond to those asking for help. And in a kind way, Alfonso said it's kind of like being a front-ender and somebody said, hey, have you used this technology? And their response being, can't believe you haven't tried that. Versus, oh man, you're going to love it when you get to try this. Just that simple way that you respond to that question is important. Something that everyone buys into and holds dear. So the sense of team, the sense of camaraderie. Somebody said actually having a focus on good culture. So actually caring about the culture of your organization is indeed an indicator of good culture. A few of the other words were trust, comfort, security, consensus, openness, honesty, code reviews. I thought this was an interesting response in that it doesn't necessarily symbolize to me the sense of actually doing code reviews, but the sense that we're in this together, that you're not alone, that you have somebody else that's supporting the work that you're doing and confirming it. And I thought that was a cool comment. So I hope you agree with a lot of those. I definitely do because I think they align with chromatics core values, which is do right by people, delight our clients, foster collaboration, give back, have fun. And I think there's one more, which is be smart in public that didn't make my list. But all of these things are actions and they all track back to the values of our company. So I asked the same question. What is bad culture? And I think my instinct is to just say, well, bad culture is anything the opposite of good culture. So we're done. But I think the, as I explore this, and I use the phrase anti values for the organization as I heard the phrases. So not being willing to share hard truths. I think this is somebody being closed off, possibly being selfish, somebody possibly being dishonest, but it's also, again, do you have the place that you feel secure enough to share that hard truth? Do you know how that person's going to react to you? It's not asking questions. So are you not asking the question of pride? Are you not asking the question out of fear? Both of those are not necessarily indicators of good culture. Lack of diversity, this came up the most. Not being inclusive. Not being able to say what you want to say. Not necessarily something bad or negative, but something that you think could exclude you from the group. Again, that fear, that sense of I could be ostracized for being myself. Being afraid to ask for help. Some are all of the team not feeling secure. Other words that were used were authoritarian, dogmatic, petty competitiveness, one-upsmanship, selfishness, dishonesty, deception. So I think this is somewhat obvious, any of these things that we consider at least a chromatic to be good culture and to be bad culture. But I have to challenge that a little bit with why do we miss this so much as business leaders and team leaders across the way? And I think it goes back to this idea of either the leadership not being bought in or not being willing to curate the content, the culture. And to do that, we have to entertain these conversations. Excuse me. So to curate and to improve our organizations, I think we have to, as leaders and as owners, you have to empower and allow for change in the organization. You have to create a forum to have these conversations. And you have to allow everyone in the team to speak into it. And I guess at some level, you have to value culture to even enter into this. So how does somebody influence culture? I asked everybody this question as well. And I apologize in advance for the repetitiveness of the answers, but I think it's pretty telling. So you become who you're around, lead by example. If you want something to be part of culture and live it, if something is toxic, don't encourage it in any way. So the concept here was, hey, if there's crash jokes being told, don't don't even laugh at them. You don't necessarily have to call that person out immediately, but don't encourage the negative behavior. Use positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement isn't needed. We talked to Larry and I talked about this and it was kind of that concept of a diet. So when you say you have a super restrictive diet, you can only eat x, y, and z. A lot of people struggle with that, but instead saying add in the good things and the bad will start to fall off. You could influence culture in small spheres by sharing ideas. It could be how you relate to others, anything from food to clothing and how you engage the outer world. I think it's just as important to say the inner world here. So it's inside the company as well as outside the company. Lead by example, creating the culture you want to be in. Participation is the best way by being proactive, by creating culture. Everyone's actions have the ability to change culture. And by example, by example is a large part. Anyone in the company can do the right thing and get others to do the right thing as well. Christopher is also much smarter than me. He uses large vocab words. He said, culture is recursive. And I said, can you explain what you mean by that? And he said it really depends on the organization. For everyone to impact culture, you have to be in a place that allows for it. It's how you treat each other, how you communicate with each other, the energy you bring or you don't bring, the way you celebrate or you don't celebrate one another, and how you deal with problems. So I thought it was interesting when all of these were very, very similar responses and they had a few things in common. So the takeaway I had was that everyone can influence culture if your organization empowers it. The influence of culture comes from action, not simply words. So leading, by example, living it out. And that ties back to our definition that this is manifest in the inward and outward actions of the group. And lead by example. It might not have been said in every one of those statements, but that was what I heard in every one of those statements. We need to implement this now. So if you're sitting here thinking, I'm not sure if these are things that we've hit well or done well in our organization. This is the six-ish step plan to try to implement and increase good culture and curate the culture of your organization. So first and foremost, leadership has to be bought in. It starts, like many things, it starts at the top. If the leadership isn't bought in, it doesn't mean that culture can't be changed, but it does create a large hurdle for people to affect the change. So I think a great example, as I was thinking about this, was our Apple rep in Chicago works with a small team. And he can influence that his team in Chicago and the culture of their small, co-located organization. But if he wants to influence the change of the entire organization of Apple, he's going to have a much harder time than Tim Cook is going to have. He can't have any assholes. So Alana emphasized this. She said, if your CEO is an asshole, he's probably going to hire assholes. And that's going to trickle down. There's a great book to know asshole rule. So you can check that out for a little more information. We might have talked a little bit about ride sharing companies during that conversation. And I just want to remind everyone that you still can influence culture. You don't have to be at the top to influence culture. So you can start with your team or your peers or a small group within your organization and try to expand from there. So I think we have to have a baseline before we really try to figure out what's bad and what's good in our organization. So it's just like you have to have to know where you are to know where you're going. If you've ever done anything with a map in Compass, it's really hard to navigate with a map if you don't know where your starting point is. With that, I think group discussions are really important as part of this. I'm going to say that again in a couple of minutes here. But I think it's important to remember that leaders have to lead. A group discussion doesn't necessarily mean that the group votes on the end. You have to have leadership that is willing to make the hard decisions and determine what is good and what is bad for the organization. So we have to define our vision and values. You have to have some of these defined to be able to check your cultural alignment and determine if you have good culture or bad culture. And I think you have to have them in a place, I'm going to emphasize this in a minute as well, that they're public and written down. I asked everybody on the team, do we live out our values as an organization? And just about everybody said yes. But Ryan said, hey, can you remind me of all of them? And I only got four out of five. Five out of the six. And I think it's important to keep that front of mind. And they need to be communicated broadly. So other people in the community should know them. Your clients should know them. Every person on your team or somebody that's trying to join your team should know these before they get there. And if you don't know what your values and your vision are, here's some practical ideas. As I mentioned, I think you can talk to your team. I think it's the best place to start. It's the people that are part of your organization. I think you need to check your gut. So if your gut says there's something not right in our organization, there's probably something not right in your organization. And you can call in the professionals, as I say. Quick caveat, I would say Jen Dairy from Plucky is an excellent business coach. She works with us specifically related to people and culture of our organization. There's a lot of people that you could call. But I think calling in the professionals is something that is needed from time to time. That's why people hire us to build their websites. They don't know how to do it. Another quick pitch is for Know Your Company, which is a tool that is relatively simple. It sends out three emails to your team during the week. On Monday, it sends out a, what are you doing question? It's going to stand up. What did you do last week? What are you doing this week? It sends out a question on Wednesday that says, is there something in our organization that we could do better at? Yes or no? Is there a benefit that we don't offer that we could? And then it lets people fill in and answer to that. And then the Friday question is something like, what's your favorite movie? And it compiles every person's response and it emails that to the entire team. So I think implementing this tool really allows you to take a pulse on the company and it's relatively easy to implement and get rolling. So happy to connect you with them. I don't get a commission, but they're wonderful people. I think you should find other resources. So I'll share my slide deck and about 20 links to articles that I thought were fascinating when we're done. But I think there's a lot of resources on this topic. I highly recommend finding and listening to Todd's talk called The Culture of Empowerment. Todd's the CEO and co-founder of Fort Kitchens. It's a talk that I've heard him gave a couple of times and I think it's very worthwhile in terms of talking about vision and culture. Talk about this with other people in the industry. So talk about it with other business owners. Talk about it with people outside of the tech industry. I talked about this with my buddy. I mentioned the J.P. Morgan. What's the culture at J.P. Morgan compared to chromatic? And obviously they're much different organizations, but it's always fascinating to talk through these things. I think it's important to find other companies that inspire you. So Apple and their concept of challenging status quo or Zappos and their concept of caring so much about culture that they will actually pay you to not take the job if you're not a good fit. I think you can ask your peers in the industry. I think, I haven't done this, but I've thought about it a lot as I've just talked. We're good friends with folks at Lullabot and Four Kitchens and I'd have to say if I went and asked them just chromatically about its values, I'd be curious to know their answer. And I think if you want to be really bold, ask your clients, tell them, this is our core values. Do you see this in the work that we produce? Do you see this in the way we interact with your team? And I think this is important enough that you should do whatever else it takes. So if you haven't figured out what your values are and if you don't know what they are, I think this is something that's business critical. And you should take whatever it takes to get it sorted out. You need to put pen to paper, as I mentioned before. So your values need to be written. They need to be clear and they need to be explained. So you can't just put a single word, trust is our value and have everyone know exactly what you mean by that. There is a depth to those. So each of the values that I mentioned for chromatic, we have a paragraph or more writing up what we mean by that specific path. Again, step five here is curate. So good is better than bad and we need to increase the good. So how do you, you know, this is something that has to be continuous and you have to be continually working on it. So we have to purge anything that's toxic. Now don't hear fire anything that doesn't align 100%. That's not, it's not the thing, but we have to start getting rid of all of the things that are toxic to our organizations as quickly as possible. And then we have to refine what can be refined. So maybe somebody doesn't have 100% culture to align with your organization, but they're at 75. And that's fine. We're going to, we're going to work on increasing the things that are good and we're going to not encourage the things that are bad. So I say slow to hire and fast to fire. Again, don't fire everyone that doesn't fit 100%. I think this is the place where you do need to, you need to take time and you need to refine the things that can be refined. I will also say that anytime someone has left chromatic that wasn't a cultural fit, every person on the team said, oh, I'm surprised it took that long. So usually every person in the company knows the thing that's toxic and knows the thing that needs to be refined. So when you're interviewing somebody, ask questions based on values, not just skills. I think this is also important to have numerous interviews. So ensuring that they have multiple points of contact on the team. Now, I know chromatic is unique. We have 12 people. So you can meet with half the company before you join. Maybe that's not possible, but you can still have them meet with numerous people on your team. And a couple of my favorite interview questions, I'm going to share them. You're welcome to use them. So I like to ask how someone defines success. I think the answers to that question show cultural alignment. I think they show people's motivations and where their personal values lie. And another one that I like to ask, which is what is your favorite vacation? What was your favorite vacation? And part of the chromatic team is we're totally distributed. We travel a lot. We have the whole team here this week, for example. So if somebody doesn't like to travel or they've never really left their hometown, it's not to say that they're not a good fit for chromatic, but that's something that they're going to have to figure out how to integrate and be pushed out of their comfort zone to be part of our team and to get the culture that we have. I want to emphasize that you're not looking for 100%. Part of the curation is figuring out what you don't have that would be better for your culture. It's part of adding people to your team that increase your diversity. It's part of adding people to your team that increase and add to your values, not just the predefined group that you already have. Lastly, you have to live this out. You have to keep it front of mind. And I said it's kind of like continuous integration. You have to filter all of your decisions this way and you have to continue having this conversation. Like I said, each one of those inflection points of a company changing is a place whether you just lost five people or you added five people, you have to revisit this conversation. And I said, you know, you have to live it out with the leadership starting to live it out as well. You can't say do as I say, not as I do, which is what my grandpa said to me all the time. But yeah, I think that's important. I'm just about done. I figured one of the questions I would get are there tools to help you with this. So I already mentioned Know Your Company. I think this one is fantastic for helping with this conversation and curating regularly. I highly recommend using Hey Taco. Hey Taco is a Slackbot integration that is really around giving people public recognition for things that they do. We have some fun stories around Hey Taco that I'm willing to share if there's time here at the end. But I think this ties to our sense of have fun and foster collaboration and give back. There's a lot of other tools similar to this. There's tools that will do micro bonuses to where your team can give bonuses to other people on the team. I think Slack is important. So Hey Taco integrates with Slack, but we use Slack. We have channels set up for specific things that we care about as a team. So we have a recipes channel. Everybody that cooks can share those things. It's a place to foster collaboration, creativity, and I don't know, just be inclusive of everybody. I'm certain there's a thousand more tools that we can talk about. But that is actually all I have this morning. So I would love to continue the conversation and talk to any of you guys about this. And yeah, I'll be here for a while. So thank you. Challenging question from Chris. So how does our organization approach diversity in a space that's tough to have diversity? How do we try to foster diversity? I think that's a great question. And I think this is something that did come up with most of our team. So one thing is you have to be cognizant of it. You have to recognize at the point when we were five people and we were all white males. You know, what are we doing? So you have to you have to recognize it and admit it. You do have to acknowledge that we are that is the predominant demographic of this specific industry. And then I think you have to not hide behind the excuse of, oh, we only got those people as applicants. I think that's the number one thing that I see most organizations. So what are you doing to increase women applying? So Alana does a lot of work with girl development. She is married. She talks a lot about women in the tech industry. And I think that's part of our company culture and part of the way we want to attract women to come work at Chromatic. I think it's going out and posting jobs for the, I'm a product which are the titles, so forgive me, but like the African American engineer, association of engineers, you know, post your job there, actually trying to get more applicants from the diversity that you're looking for. And talk about it. I think those are the things that I think are will help the most foster university. Alana, for sure. So Alana said just for the recording, she said that your job description also helps. So what are you saying about the job? How are you writing about it? How are you talking about it? Are you sharing benefits and things along the lines of maternity leave and being willing to publicly say what you're supporting women in the community? Thank you guys so much for being here.