Every Founder Has a Span of Culture. His Was 100.

Audio It Was Never Yours. Can You Lead a Culture You Didn't Create? | Eric Giesecke

Video Can You Lead A Culture You Didn't Create? | Eric Giesecke

Chapter-by-Chapter Summary

Following are the sections we covered in this conversation with their summaries, along with the time location in the video and audio to follow along. The timestamps in orange correspond to the chapters in the YouTube version of the podcast episode. This video will display to the lower right as you scroll down. 

00:06:12 What Happens When Nobody Chose You?

In 2015 Eric and a partner acquired Planet DDS through a search fund. Twenty-five employees, a founding team who had known each other for years, several of whom had worked together at previous ventures. His background was international construction management and a bottleless water cooler company. By his own account he knew nothing about dentistry beyond getting his teeth cleaned, and nothing about software beyond using the internet.

I called what he walked into tension. He corrected me. It was apprehension.

The distinction is not politeness. Tension is a conflict you resolve. Apprehension is a question, and the question in that room was, in his words, "who the heck are these guys? And why are they here? And what do they know about dentistry? And what does this mean for me?"

Nobody chose him. He had to be chosen afterwards, by people who already had a company they liked.

17:30 Do You Lead First… or Listen First?

Both, and the order is the whole answer.

They arrived with a 30-60-90 day plan and threw it out on day two. "You get punched in the mouth," he said, which is the only honest thing anyone has ever said about a 30-60-90 day plan.

What he did instead was bring people into the headquarters, have the founder explain in the room why he had sold, and then go to dinner and not talk about work. And when employees asked him directly what he knew about dental software, he told them: as much as he had learned in three months. "Not pretending to be someone you're not," he called it.

Then the second move, which he thinks matters more. He pulled every scrap of Salesforce and support data the company had, showed people things about their own business nobody had seen before, and fixed something everybody already knew was broken.

Trust, then competence. Neither one survives long without the other.

21:57 Can You Inherit Values?

You can pull five values off a famous culture deck, he says. Netflix, or any of the ones everybody quotes. Just pick those five. They're great. Every company should do that.

He means the exact opposite, and what he says next is the most useful sentence in the hour.

"It's not your values. It's not you putting your imprint on the company itself. Because if you try to do that, it'll come across as fake."

The first version of a company's values, in his account, is a reflection of the company with a little influence from the person running it. Not a statement of intent from the top. And if the room says it is accountable and you have watched it miss three deadlines, you do not get to say "that's not us." You say it matters to all of us, and then you go to work on the distance between the claim and the behaviour.

But this is not surrender, and the counterweight is what makes it usable. He will not allow anything onto the list that he does not believe in. "If they had said we just sell at any cost, I would have said that's not the company I think we should be."

Authorship and endorsement are different jobs. He gave up the first and kept the second.

30:40 How Do You Know a Culture Is Real?

Not from a survey, and not from the poster.

Eric's test is what happens when you bring someone in from outside, over the heads of people who wanted that job, and those people still agree the new person is the right one. Not grudgingly. Actually.

"They love the culture, they love the company, they want to win. But they have acknowledgement that, look, if we're going to be ambitious, we need to bring somebody in with these skills."

A culture that can absorb being hired over is real. A culture that cannot is not a culture at all. It is a set of preferences held by whoever arrived first, and the first serious outside hire will show you which one you have.

40:34 Does Leadership Get Harder… or Lonelier?

Twenty-five people to three hundred and fifty.

At twenty-five he knew everyone's families, knew what people did on weekends, went to baseball games. At three hundred and fifty he spends most of his time with about ten people. He is careful to say those ten became friends and that there is a real team there. He is equally careful not to pretend the job is the same job.

At twenty-five he was personally fixing a support queue with a thousand open tickets running on antiquated software. Now the work is alignment across teams, how the company holds itself accountable, and what progress against a goal actually looks like when you cannot see it yourself.

He says the honest thing out loud. This is the biggest company he has ever run. He tells his board he is learning as he goes. And he wonders which of the two jobs he is better at, which is not a question a person asks unless they have noticed something they are not entirely happy about.

43:47 Can the Company Run Without You?

"There's an old saying that you want to make yourself irrelevant as a CEO. There's some truth to that."

He will not claim it. "I wouldn't like to say I'm irrelevant. I'm probably sometimes annoying." He still turns up on product calls he has no business being on, because he enjoys it and because it makes him feel alive, which is a more honest answer than most people give.

The structural version is sharper than the personal one. There are two ways a company changes leaders. The CEO leaves and a new one arrives, which is sometimes necessary and is always risky. Or people already inside step up, having spent years being deliberately exposed to decisions beyond their own department, learning to think past their own P&L.

The second only exists if somebody built it years earlier. Succession is not an event that happens to a company. It is a practice or it is an emergency.

47:25 How Many People Can One Leader Actually Carry?

Seven. "I don't think you can have ten direct reports and be an effective leader."

Then the structural answer, which is where he gets interesting. Planet DDS is organised the ordinary way, go-to-market, post-sales, product, engineering, finance, and HR. But what he says is working better is tight cross-functional pods pointed at one problem. Their integrated payments product has sales, support, account management, product, and technical people who all report up through different functions. Put them on one shared goal, he says, and "you can see the magic happen."

The purpose is flattening, and he is blunt about why.

"Middle management is the death of motivation in some ways. You've got folks here who just do a job. It is to make sure you do your job."

54:53 What Breaks After Employee 100?

Nothing replaces him. That is the answer, and it took me a while to hear it properly.

There are central gestures and he does them. Recognition on all-hands calls. Four people voted by their colleagues every year and sent to president's club, which this year meant Jamaica. He is clear that this is not where culture lives.

"Culture is best administered, evaluated, and delivered at the smallest kind of level, most local level."

So he finds people. Not a role, not a title, nothing anyone is appointed to. The ones playing pickup basketball, the ones at the happy hour, the ones encouraging colleagues in Teams channels. The ones who actually care. He joked about calling them culture moles and then corrected himself to barometers, which is better, because a mole reports and a barometer just tells you the pressure. Every so often he pulls one aside and asks what they made of someone the company hired last month.

And then he named the cost, which almost nobody does.

"CEOs are all control freaks. The good ones are. And so as you get to larger things, you have to kind of trust."

Back to you

Put the pieces together.

A leader can hold a culture personally up to a number. Eric's was around a hundred, which is where fifteen minutes with every new hire stopped being arithmetic that worked. Below that number the culture is held by one person paying close attention. Above it, it is either distributed to people who carry it locally, or it drifts, and nobody notices for a year.

What Eric had going for him is the thing that looked like his handicap. He never owned the culture at Planet DDS. He walked into it. The discipline he was forced into on day one, that the values were a reflection and not his imprint, is the same discipline that let him hand the culture to other people at three hundred and fifty. He never had to give up something he believed was his, because he never believed it.

You probably do believe it. You may even be right that you built it. Neither of those makes it a thing you can keep holding.

And the failure here is not holding the culture personally. That works. It is what makes an early culture strong, and it is why your first twenty people would run through a wall for you. The failure is what happens when it starts to slip, because the instinct is to hold tighter, and holding tighter is the thing that breaks it. Eric said the quiet part himself. Control freaks. The good ones.

So here is one small thing, and it is not an audit.

Think of the last three people who joined your company. Not whether they were good hires. Whether you could say, in one sentence each, what made them a fit.

If you can, you are still inside your span.

If you cannot, you crossed it at some point without being told, and the question is no longer whether to distribute the culture. It is whether you know who is already carrying it.