What I learned about culture at AWS
I worked at Amazon for the last six years running Monitoring and Observability services for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Without a doubt, I learned more over this time than at any other point in my career. I owe this to the many exceptional leaders who continue to shape the vision and path for Amazon and AWS.
As I was in the process of making the jump to my new role in Coalition (see this post for details) it caused me to reflect on my learnings from AWS and how I can carry them forward.
The topic for today is culture. Citing Alyson Doyle of The Balance, “Culture refers to the attitudes and behaviors of a company and its employees. It is evident in the way an organization’s people interact with each other, the values they hold, and the decisions they make.” I think about culture in a few different ways. First, it’s a scaling mechanism. Leaders can’t be in every conversation or make every decision. By creating culture, we hope that the organization models behaviors or values that are consistent even when we aren’t there. Further, when this culture is unique and aligned with the company mission and vision it can enhance a sense of purpose and camaraderie. Finally, defining a culture helps to attract job seekers that associate with the elements of that culture and thus strengthen and propagate it.
Most companies seem to get this far. They have some statement of core values or leadership principles. When I worked for a Danaher company in the past, we had five core values including ‘The Best Team Wins’, and ‘When Customers Talk, We Listen’. At Amazon, we have 14 leadership principles including things like ‘Hire and Develop the Best’ and ‘Customer Obsession’. If you were paying attention just then, you may have noticed that the statements look an awful lot alike. Does that mean my experience in the culture of these two organizations was similar — nope, not by a mile! Part of the difference may reside in the culture statement itself. For example, Danaher is missing anything about interactions in the organization (we have ‘Earns Trust’ at Amazon). Where I really want to focus, though, is how the culture is implemented. To me, that is the real learning about Amazon.
At Danaher, these core values existed largely as posters on walls or seemingly obligatory slides in All Hands Communication. I suspect Danaher is far from alone in this characterization. I’m now thoroughly convinced this is an anti-pattern for effective culture implementation.
At Amazon, our culture and leadership principles permeate daily life, starting with our hiring process. I’ll cover hiring in my next post, but we interview every candidate using our leadership principles. No one gets a job offer from Amazon unless an interview loop determines they are already successfully exhibiting those principles. When we review talent we talk about strengths and growth areas in terms of our leadership principles. When we write a promotion document, we articulate a case built around the leadership principles. Many organizations create awards based around the leadership principles. The result of all of these different leadership principle based mechanisms is that the principles (and thus the peculiar Amazon culture) become part of our daily vocabulary. I have never worked anywhere where a culture was more real and tangible than at AWS and for me that was exceptionally positive.
Now, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the implementation of culture is perfect at AWS. Any core value or leadership principle can be overused to the detriment. This is a common coaching scenario, but I rarely see it have a negative impact on culture overall.
The bigger potential pitfall is what I like to term the ‘weaponization’ of leadership principles. It goes something like this: “You were not acting very customer obsessed when you [fill in the blank]”. All too often this occurs over email and with an audience on CC: for effect. Instances here can be pretty painful. Someone is labeling another person as not demonstrating a particular leadership principle. There are always two sides to every story. On the other end of these is someone that was almost certainly doing their best to model the leadership principles too.
My advice — just don’t! Whatever your core values or leadership principles are, don’t wield them like weapons. Instead, engage in a discussion. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Try to discern the reason for the behavior and make constructive suggestions for improvement.
So, in summary:
- Write a statement of culture. Define the core principles that best capture the behaviors, attitudes, and values you want modeled. Make it peculiar and unique for your organization.
- Don’t print posters. Instead, build mechanisms around your culture. Hire based on it and promote based on it. If you have strong enough mechanisms, it becomes part of daily vocabulary.
- Watch out for ‘weaponization’ of culture. Leaders need to aggressively discourage those behaviors when they pop up.
P.S. I couldn’t help but include a short bit on my favorite Amazon Leadership Principles. This is a common question I got when interviewing candidates. First is Customer Obsession. If you are truly putting your customers first and working backwards from their needs, good things happen! Second is Ownership which may be the most defining aspect of how organizations at Amazon are structured and operate. There is an amazing amount of autonomy at all levels in the organization. Finally, in a narrow heat between Think Big and Deliver Results, I’ll go with Deliver Results because of how critical it is to actually put the products, services, and features in customer hands.
If you have a favorite core value or leadership principle from your company, leave it in the comment stream!
