Defining a Great Engineering Culture
How to Build a Great Engineering Culture: Article 2
A strong engineering culture can accelerate innovation, improve productivity and retention, and create high-performing teams. Conversely, a weak or undefined culture can cause low morale, inefficiency, misalignment and higher turnover, threatening team and company success.
The first article in this series examined what an engineering culture is and why a strong one is essential for business success. It covered the four-step framework for building a culture: Define, Embed, Embody, and elicit Feedback.
This article focuses on the framework's “define” step. It examines the properties of a great culture, how to determine what your engineering culture should be, and how to define and articulate it effectively.
The key steps to follow for defining an engineering culture are:
Start with the company culture: ensuring it is clearly defined.
Define your engineering values: building off the company culture.
Deal with cultural misalignment at the company, engineering or personal level.
Start with the Company Culture
Engineering culture does not exist independently but lives within the company's context. Therefore, a clearly defined company culture is the foundation for a thriving Engineering Culture.
If the company culture and values are not articulated anywhere, work with senior stakeholders to define the company culture. In his book ‘The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business’, Patrick Lencioni offers a framework for defining company values, including Core Values, Aspirational Values, Permission-to-play Values, and Accidental Values. His framework can help define company values (and potentially engineering values). See this video for a high-level overview of Lencioni’s approach. At the company level, those values will likely be documented as unique and simple words or phrases that people can easily remember.
Once the company culture is defined, sharing and articulating it is important. A document like a culture deck is a great way to do this. It can take many forms and shapes, but in general, it will express the essence of the company culture by describing the following: the values in detail, the company’s ways of working, some of the team (often with personal anecdotes), company history, and various other ways to convey what it is like to be part of the company. If done well, this can be a powerful recruiting tool. Having a captivating articulation of the culture will draw people to the company. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where people who share similar values to you are taken in by the articulation and then more likely to apply, whereas those who don’t will self-select out. This article has a list of great culture decks.
If the company culture is not already defined, and you do not have the influence to work with senior company stakeholders to define it, then you can still go ahead and define your Engineering Culture. In doing so, you should document the Engineering values more explicitly than you would otherwise since the company values are not already documented. From there, you can go through the rest of the framework of creating the culture by embedding, embodying, and getting feedback. Once the culture is well established in engineering, use that as a successful exemplar to push back into the broader organisation.
Define the Engineering Values
Once company values are defined, you can build the engineering values on the company ones, reflecting their meaning in an engineering context. Unlike company values, the engineering ones don’t need to be framed as catchphrases. If a culture deck exists, expand it to clarify how company values apply to engineering, including relevant behaviours and practices. When you document your engineering values, ensure they do not conflict with the company values or dilute their meaning or importance.
The most important thing is for you and your engineering leadership team to be clear on the values of your engineering culture when you try to embed them. The following article in the series explains embedding and codifying the values in detail. Still, at a high level, it is about clearly articulating the values and making them as pervasive as possible in things like the hiring process, role descriptions, promotions, recognition and shout-outs, awards, etc.
What makes a great engineering culture
To make this concrete, here are the properties of a strong engineering culture.
Learning and Growth-mindset:
Growth mindset: In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dwek defines this as “the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts” instead of believing that your intelligence or aptitude is fixed and cannot be changed. She found that students and employees with a growth mindset achieve higher performance and resilience. From a cultural point of view, this means trying to find people who subscribe to this or are willing to.
Learning and self-improvement: People who are focused on learning and growing themselves are essential in knowledge work, such as technology. This is especially true since the technology landscape changes so quickly. So, it is essential to look for signs that people are trying to grow and evolve themselves. DORA’s State of DevOps Report (2021) states that continuous learning correlates with higher software delivery performance. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella transformed Microsoft's culture by emphasising a learning mindset, leading to increased innovation and financial success.
Bravery: One of the best ways to learn is from failure. Creating an environment where people can do this requires bravery. Be brave enough to try new, risky, and uncertain things that may fail, and admit that you are unsure of what you are trying.
Blameless reflection: Accountability is essential, but there is a difference between holding people accountable and blaming them. A focus on blame decreases the ability to learn and improve. Instead, you need a culture that carefully examines and understands why things could be better, then learns from that and improves. DORA’s State of DevOps Report (2022) says that high-trust, low-blame cultures are 1.6x more likely to perform better.
People-centric:
People-first: People need to care about people. As a leader, it’s important to understand what drives each person in your team: their motivations, strengths, likes and dislikes, and what’s affecting them outside of work. Look for people who care about the people they work with. Google’s Project Oxygen found that developing people is one of the key pillars of being a great manager, and Gallup found that employee engagement yields 23% higher profitability.
Emotional Intelligence: There is a limiting belief among many engineers that the path to optimal decision-making is to ignore emotions completely. But everyone is human, and trying to ignore our humanity makes our decisions and actions much worse. Emotions affect actions, decisions and other people. So when you hire, look for people with emotional intelligence or who are at least willing to learn and improve. TalentSmart says that “90% of top performers are also high in emotional intelligence”, and Daniel Goleman’s On Emotional Intelligence explains that leaders with high EI are more effective at resolving conflicts and building cohesive teams, leading to better organisational outcomes.
Authenticity: While bringing one's whole self to work is a commendable goal, expecting everyone to do so often reflects privilege. Many minority groups fear discrimination if they do so. Instead, focus on finding individuals willing to be true to themselves and align their actions with personal values. A lot of this comes down to creating an environment where authenticity is possible, but trying to find authentic people helps create a people-first culture.
Low ego:
Humility goes hand in hand with a growth mindset. It involves recognising that you don’t have all the answers. You need to rely on the people around you and the expertise, knowledge, and ideas that they bring. Even those with less experience may offer valid perspectives worth listening to and learning from. In Good to Great, Jim Collins found that companies led by humble leaders significantly outperformed competitors, prioritising organisational success over personal glory. The Journal of Management shows that humble leaders build high-performing teams by admitting mistakes and learning from others, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
Internally collaborative: Competition is okay, but if people are competitive, they should be externally competitive (i.e., want the company to win) but internally collaborative. Competing with others in the company doesn’t yield a better overall result.
No politics: People must be transparent about their motivations. Trust erodes when people play political games for personal gain, and the work environment becomes hostile. Manipulative individuals can exploit values like vulnerability, transparency, and authenticity, hindering these values from flourishing and quickly damaging the culture. While influence is necessary, it should benefit the company rather than serve personal interests.
Open and transparent communication
Feedback is necessary for growth. People must be able to give feedback to everyone they work with (subordinates, peers, managers). They must learn to give affirmative and constructive feedback on performance and behaviour in a productive way. People also need to know how to receive feedback by being curious, open to learning and change, and not defensive and closed. Research by Gallup shows that employees who receive regular feedback are 3.6 times more likely to be motivated to do outstanding work.
Showing vulnerability: Leaders must show vulnerability to help the culture flourish. Leaders who admit mistakes and show that they don’t know everything allow more input from those around them. Vulnerability is essential for creating a psychologically safe environment. Brené Brown, in “Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts”, highlights that vulnerability is a key driver of trust and connection. Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety was the most important factor in high-performing teams.
Transparency: Ideally, everyone in the company has visibility into its inner workings, and very little is kept secret. When changes are planned, the teams know that something is happening and are involved in the discussion. Slack’s study shows transparency attracts premium talent, builds trust, generates better performance, improves efficiency and strengthens business accountability.
Collaborative and autonomous teams
Team outcomes over individual output: Many software development teams don’t necessarily collaborate effectively in their teams. They are more like a set of developers working independently and in parallel, usually towards an independent goal for each developer. Engineers then measure their value based on how much code they produce or how many features they write. Ideally, teams should focus on the outcomes (changes in customer behaviour, etc.) as a team rather than what an individual produces. They should collaborate towards a common goal using techniques like pairing, swarming or mobbing when applicable. A study by Jamal M. Assbeihat emphasises that collaborative efforts among team members significantly boost overall productivity and team outcomes compared to individual work. Charles Duhigg’s studies in What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team revealed that teams focused on shared goals and mutual support outperform those driven by individual competition.
Symmathesy means interacting with multiple variables to produce a mutual learning context. People who genuinely collaborate learn from each other and the systems they work within. They become generative, and the team's value exceeds the sum of its parts.
Empowered teams: Having a team that is empowered means delegating some of the decisions to the team. The team needs to understand and be aligned with the company's direction to determine what they will work on and how they will work on it. It can be hard to balance alignment and autonomy, and often, to begin with, alignment trumps autonomy. But the goal is to get to the point where the team is empowered. A study by Vorecol indicates that teams characterised by high levels of autonomy can boost performance by over 20%.
Desire to deliver customer value:
Customer Focus: Building a team focused on customers and solving customer problems is crucial. Understanding the customer helps the team determine more effective solutions from a quality, experience, and outcome perspective. It is a key driver of business success. A Deloitte study shows that “client-centric companies are 60% more profitable compared to companies not focused on the customer.”
Understanding the why: Teams that understand their customers tend to deliver better. People who want to understand their customers and the “why” behind their work are likelier to deliver something worthwhile. A Visual Capitalist article shows that employees who understand customer needs, exhibit passion for the company's purpose, and demonstrate accountability contribute to stronger business performance.
Focus on value: Some developers can fall into the trap of exploring technology for the sake of it rather than to deliver something. Learning and exploring are essential, but if there is too much bias toward them and no bias toward actually delivering value, then that can have severe consequences for the company.
Accountability is an essential value for leaders but can be challenging to achieve. However, to deliver customer value, leaders need to hold their teams accountable. Trust quickly erodes when people say they will do things but don’t, so building a culture where this is called out is essential.
Alternative cultures
Although the above values are of a great engineering culture, culture is not one-size-fits-all. Engineering values must align with a company's stage, goals, and structure. Here’s how culture might differ in different contexts:
If you were in a smaller-stage startup or a company looking to maintain a fairly small engineering team, you might be biased toward individual contribution and rapid delivery and less focused on collaboration and quality.
If the company were a larger enterprise, it may focus less on rapid delivery and more on quality and efficiency.
If the company had a more open-source style of contribution where the collaboration tends to be more asynchronous, then the collaboration values may be different.
This does imply that the engineering values need to be refreshed and revisited over time as the business context changes, but it should not imply that they would completely change. The whole reason for articulating values is to define the type of company you are trying to build, and the core of that should not change significantly.
Dealing with misalignment
Once you've defined your engineering values, the next challenge is handling any misalignment between that desired culture and the company's current context, which could hinder cultural growth. This misalignment can occur with:
The company culture (defined or actual),
The existing engineering culture, or even
Yourself
Misalignment with the company culture
If engineering values clash with company culture, leaders have three options:
Change the company culture by influencing leadership.
Shield engineering teams from cultural dysfunctions to preserve a strong subculture.
Acknowledge misalignment openly with teams while working toward gradual change.
Changing the company culture
Your first port of call should be to try to affect the company culture. Collaborate with company leadership to gradually change the written culture or their behaviours. Affecting actual behaviours should be your priority, as they can clash with or enhance the desired culture. Show the company leadership the impact of their behaviours, and what better looks like. If you have an open team, this may be successful, but it will likely take a lot of time and effort (and may still not be successful).
An effective way to change the company culture is to demonstrate the desired culture in practice (as described in this HBR article), by focusing on building an effective Engineering culture and using that as a case study or exemplar to take root in the broader organisation. Doing that requires the techniques described below to shield the engineering teams or acknowledge the misalignment to create space for the engineering culture to grow.
Shielding the engineering teams
Sometimes, you can shield the team from dysfunctions in the culture outside of engineering so that the engineering department remains safe. You will unlikely shield the team completely, but you can offer some dampening to reduce the adverse impact. Shielding the team requires you (the engineering leader) to live in two worlds: the current company culture and the engineering culture you want to create.
Example 1: If leadership constantly changes priorities, it can be helpful to create a buffer before those changes reach the team. For example, you can introduce a rule allowing the team to pivot only at certain times (e.g., during quarter or mid-quarter planning) or after a certain period.
Example 2: The go-to-market leader's directive reduced cross-team collaboration by limiting Slack communication with their team. To shield the team from this dysfunctional request, we established regular rituals for structured collaboration, which helped dampen the negative culture's effect.
Example 3: I encountered a cultural mismatch when the company leadership team had a blame culture, contrasting the blameless learning culture I was fostering in Engineering. During an outage affecting a significant customer, they sought to pinpoint and blame the individual responsible. To shield the team, I proposed a Post-Incident Review to identify the root cause and implement preventive measures rather than assigning blame to a specific person.
There is a fine line between shielding the team and being transparent. Transparency is usually the best default, but if there are cultural mismatches, shielding the team by not passing on the message, or at least dampening it, can be the most effective approach.
Acknowledging the misalignment
Sometimes, it can be helpful to acknowledge to the engineering team that there is a cultural gap and be clear that you are working on changing things, but the gap needs to be accepted. This level of transparency can help build trust with the team and get their support for cultural change.
I once had a team frustrated with being treated like a feature factory. They wanted to prioritise customer behaviours and business outcomes over timely delivery, but they were struggling to meet deadlines at the time. I acknowledged the cultural gap and noted that while we ideally should focus on outcomes, we weren't mature enough yet. Therefore, we needed to start delivering regularly and on time to build trust within the business, which would help me shift the broader culture toward their desired state.
If the gap is too large
Sometimes, the gap between the company culture and the desired culture is too large, or the inertia to change is too great for your desired culture to work effectively. From there, you can live with a watered-down version of your desired culture. This option may still be feasible if that version is close enough or if you are willing to live with the gap. If not, you should find a company that is more amenable to your desired culture.
Misalignment with the current Engineering department
Misalignment with the current engineering culture is expected since you are trying to create a new culture different from the existing one. The subsequent articles of this series will delve into great detail about how to build your desired engineering culture. As a starting point, it is worth building a clear picture of the current Engineering culture and how far it needs to change to reach the desired state, which means auditing and understanding:
What (if anything) is documented about the current culture
The people in the engineering leadership group, their values and how they work
The people in the engineering group as a whole
The practices, behaviours and rituals of the engineering group
Misalignment with yourself
Being able to see if there is a misalignment between yourself and the desired values is hard (for you) to see. It can be easy to get into a trap of defining your ideal set of values but not realise that you don’t embody that value set. As a concrete example, I’ve seen a few times where there is a desired value around team autonomy, but the leader strongly needed to understand and control low-level details. They weren’t aware that they were doing that, which prevented that value from ever taking root in the company.
If there is misalignment between the desired culture and yourself, you have two options: change your desired engineering culture to be more in line with your actual behaviours or change yourself to be more aligned with your desired culture.
In Summary
Defining your desired engineering values is the first step in building a culture. To do this, you must build on your company culture and clearly define your engineering values so you and your engineering leadership team can effectively embed them.
Although there is no one-size-fits-all approach to values, which must match the organisational context, in general, great engineering cultures are built around:
Learning and growth-mindset
People-centric
Low ego
Open and transparent communication
Collaborative and autonomous teams
Desire to deliver customer value
If there is misalignment at the company level, work to change the company culture, shield engineering from it, or acknowledge the gap.
Your engineering culture already exists, whether you’ve defined it or not. The question is if it's intentional or evolving by default. Defining your values is the first step toward building a high-performing engineering culture.
In the next article, we’ll explore how to embed these values into your hiring, decision-making, and team rituals, ensuring that your defined culture becomes a reality.