The Culture Starts With You

This month marks the anniversary of when I signed the deal to sell LYONSCG to Capgemini. Looking back, I know it was the right decision. We’d been growing aggressively to stay competitive and had earned “global leader in eCommerce” status, but the market was changing quickly. Demandware was being acquired by Salesforce, consolidation was happening all around us, and we knew we had to pay attention not just to where we were, but to where things were headed.

That doesn’t mean it was easy. When I think about LYONSCG now, what I miss most isn’t the business. It’s the people. The culture. The clients who became friends. The colleagues I still see at conferences and reunions. I’m incredibly proud of what WE built. WE created something together—something that, in hindsight, felt a little like lightning in a bottle.

Today, when I look back on that experience as a whole, one of the biggest lessons I’ve taken away is that…

Culture doesn’t start with a mission statement or a set of company values. Culture starts with the leader.

You Have to Live the Culture First

At LYONSCG, we talked a lot about being a learning culture. We wanted people to learn from their mistakes, challenge each other, get better and grow. But eventually, I realized I couldn’t ask other people to do those things if I wasn’t willing to do them myself.

I had to live and be the culture before I could ask it of other people.

That required me to change. I started my career as an engineer, and for a long time I thought being stoic was the right way to lead. Keep your emotions in check. Don’t show too much. Push through. But as the company grew, I realized that wasn’t going to be enough.

I had to become a better communicator. I had to learn to accept conflict and eventually understand that conflict can actually be good. I wanted people to fight for their opinions. I wanted them to challenge me and each other. That didn’t mean we had to agree all the time. In fact, I wanted the opposite. I wanted people to have strong opinions, hash things out, and then leave the room aligned and ready to move forward together.

I also had to get more comfortable with my own emotions. Eventually, everyone in the company had seen me cry. People would joke about it, but for me, it represented something bigger: I gave a damn, and everyone knew it. I was comfortable in my own skin in a way I hadn’t always been.

That was personal growth, but it was also leadership growth.

Understand That Culture Is Built Moment to Moment

We tend to think of culture as the big stuff: values, team-building events, company meetings, retreats. Those things matter, but culture is really created in the little moments—in the behaviors people see from you every day.

At LYONSCG, we also talked a lot about being 100% referenceable. Even if we lost a deal, we wanted that company to feel good about its experience with us. We wanted people to be able to say, “They handled themselves well.” That meant understanding that every interaction, every email and every difficult conversation was a reflection of the organization.

Imagine a customer calls you furious because their website is down. They’re losing money, they’re stressed, and they’re blaming you. Your instinct might be to get defensive: It’s not our fault. Why are you yelling at me? But we trained our people to respond differently: I hear you. I’m going to look into it, and I’ll get back to you.

That’s culture in action. It’s choosing to take responsibility for the experience, even when you aren’t 100% responsible for the problem. To be 100% responsible isn’t always possible, but we tried to operate that way.

The same principle applies when you make a mistake. Do you get defensive or blame someone else? Or do you own it, clean it up and figure out what needs to change?

I’ve never believed leadership is about being perfect. It’s about being real, recognizing your blind spots and continuing to learn and grow.

If You Say You’re a Learning Culture, Prove It

At LYONSCG, we tried to build systems around that philosophy. We had quarterly reviews because waiting an entire year to give someone meaningful feedback was time wasted. We did postmortems after projects and asked questions like: What did we do well? What didn’t we do well? Did we quote it correctly? What could we have done differently?

Then we took those lessons and fed them back into our processes. We created LYONSCG University, where young people could work through a dummy project and learn from someone who had done it many times before.

We were essentially eating our own dog food: If we said we were a learning organization, we had to create opportunities for people to actually learn.

We also flew our employees into Chicago for company gatherings. At one point, that meant bringing 400 people together from all over the country and the world. It was expensive, but it was important. People were spread out everywhere, and someone might have worked with another person for eight or ten months without ever sitting in the same room with them.

When we brought everyone together, we could work through problems, have conversations, make progress and have fun. It created a level of connection that you simply can’t replicate on a screen.

Those experiences reinforced something we believed:

If you want to be the best, you can’t be static. You have to keep learning and changing. And again, that started with me. Leaders need to lead by example.

Leadership Can Be Lonely. Do Something About It.

Building LYONSCG was also one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done. In 2008, I had a second mortgage on my house to make payroll. I had two kids. I had put a lot on the line, and I was trying to prove something to myself.

That kind of pressure can be isolating, and one of the smartest things I did was build a support system. I had a coach. I joined the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. I listened to other business owners talk about what they were going through, and I realized something important: I wasn’t crazy.

The stress was normal. The imposter syndrome was normal. Other people were figuring it out, too. You just don’t have to navigate all of it alone.

That lesson has stayed with me and is a big part of why I do the work I do today. I want to help leaders believe in themselves and be on their own side. I’m trying to help people avoid some of the mistakes I made, while recognizing that they’re still going to make their own.

Believe in the Leader You Become Along the Way

If I could go back and talk to the version of myself who was just starting LYONSCG, I wouldn’t tell him to do anything differently. All of it—the mistakes, the risks, the stress, the uncomfortable conversations and the successes—helped me become the person and leader I needed to be.

I’d tell him to trust himself.

Trust people. Build a support system. Manage the stress. And keep learning and evolving.

Because ultimately, building LYONSCG wasn’t just about building a company. It was about building myself, too.

That’s true for every leader. You can put your values on the wall. You can write them into an employee handbook. You can talk about the culture you want to create. But your people are watching what you actually do. They’re watching how you handle pressure, how you respond when you’re wrong, how you treat a difficult customer, how you deal with conflict, whether you listen and whether you change.

The culture you create will always reflect something about the people creating it. So before you ask your team to communicate better, take ownership, embrace feedback, handle conflict, learn from mistakes or keep growing, ask yourself whether you’re doing those things, too.

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