I joined Temporal about a year and a half ago and immediately doubled down on our culture. Joining a growing company means your work gets a chance to change it and here, I knew I’d have the chance to improve the tech developers depend on, alongside the people that care about them most.
I knew our ambition would ask a lot of us, and coming in as the Senior VP of People, I wanted us to be specific about how we work and the experience of working here. I knew it was a vital part of what would help us achieve our goals. I kept coming back to a question many people ask about a company they love. How do we keep the essence of who we are as we scale?
I assumed that was a culture question. Today, I would argue it is actually the most important operational question we face. The distance between those two framings is most of what I have learned.
Companies don’t just get bigger. They change.#
A company’s growth compounds; sometimes unexpectedly. What makes a company excellent at one size is precisely what constrains it at the next.
This is the nature of growth. The job changes underneath you, usually before anyone has a chance to say so out loud. The leaders who struggle are rarely the ones who get worse. They are the ones doing exactly what the company needed two phases ago.
We have been using a phase shift framework internally to name these transitions, because the transitions are the hard part, not the size of the phase. We have crossed four phases in 18 months. Naming these transitions has given us the power to recognize the chaos and give our employees peace of mind, all while affirming that what we are all experiencing is not only okay, but expected.
What the middle actually feels like#
Internally, we call the hypergrowth phase we’re in the “messy middle.”
Here is what it feels like from the inside. I suspect some of you will recognize every line.
- You are working harder than you ever have, and the results aren’t moving as fast as you want.
- A deliverable slips because half the team is still onboarding and coming up to speed.
- You are in more meetings than ever and it feels like less is getting done.
- A decision that used to take one conversation takes five conversations over a week.
None of this means something is wrong. In fact, almost everything that breaks this year was built correctly, it was just built for a smaller company. The person who built it wasn’t careless; they were right at the time.
We say this to our teams often because naming the messiness gives our people the tools to acknowledge how they are feeling when things get hard. People can survive ambiguity they were told to expect. What they cannot survive is privately concluding that the company is falling apart.
Culture is the execution layer#
Here is the part that changed our view on culture.
Our strategy is good and we have a clear view of where we are going. That is not our constraint. Our constraint is that we’ll grow to a thousand plus people in the next year. These are people who will execute that strategy, and most of them will never be in a room with our founders or leadership team, or even our extended leadership team may be out of reach.
Think about what that means mechanically. Hundreds of significant decisions a week, thousands of small ones. Made by people who can’t ask the founders, can’t ask their skip-level, and in many cases can’t ask anyone who was there when the thing they are deciding about was built.
There is exactly one mechanism that operates at that scale and that is culture. Culture is the decision-making system that runs when there is not a leader in the room.
For a thousand people, this mechanism is the lever with the most reach. Which makes building a strong, cohesive culture an execution imperative, not a values argument. A weak culture slows execution because thousands of minor decisions are incrementally worse. Those degraded micro-decisions compound into a much larger problem.
The word for running the execution engine is discipline#
Every one of those thousands of decisions is someone choosing between the fast answer and the right one, usually with nobody watching. This is where discipline comes in, discipline in how we decide. We define this discipline through behaviors and anti-behaviors tied to our values.
Our four values are public: unlock possibilities, reliable as gravity, feedback that fuels, fly together. What we have never published is the more useful part. Under each value, we also wrote down the way that value goes wrong. Read these four together and they are a fairly precise description of how a company at our stage comes apart.
- Unlock possibilities: letting curiosity turn into analysis paralysis
- Reliable as gravity: chasing perfection over progress, or discouraging experimentation
- Feedback that fuels: critiquing the person instead of the work, or taking feedback personally
- Fly together; chasing visibility or credit, and losing our humility
When we updated our values late last year, we explicitly outlined actionable behaviors alongside the common pitfalls above. Together, they read like instructions for exactly the moment we are in.
Values tell you what good looks like. They don’t tell you how to choose.#
This is the gap that is the hardest to identify.
We spent a year watching our values get used and found something missing. Values tell you what good looks like. They do not tell you how to decide when two of them pull against each other.
Values don’t resolve those tensions. Judgment does.
And for years, that judgment traveled by proximity. People learned how the founders thought by being near them or by being near someone who was. That works beautifully for a period of time, but it does not survive doubling twice.
What was missing was never the values. It was the mental models underneath them. The are the way the people who built the company think about the tradeoffs and they had never been written down. So we wrote them down.
Culture at our size has to be engineered to be explicit, rather than implicit.
If you are reading this as a candidate#
I have been deliberately honest about the hard parts.
If the messy middle sounds like the worst working environment you can imagine, we are probably not the right place for you and I would rather you know that now. If it sounds like the most interesting problem you could spend your time on, at a company still small enough you can see your own fingerprints on it, come join us as we scale through another four phases.