1 year of YetiZen—what I have learned from running a gaming accelerator
June 21, 2012
Philosophy 2: Build a company culture with actionable feedback exchange
One of my favorite linguists and researchers of all time is a woman called Deborah Tannen. Tannen is best known for her work on gender differences in communication both at home and at the workplace.
However, her most interesting book to me has been The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words. In the book Tannen explores how increasingly communication and discourse is focused on a polarity of two extremes, an either or whereas the real truth in business and in life is in the middle. The argument culture gets in the way of our understanding and needlessly polarizes us.
Over the years it has been amazing to me how some of the brightest business people are completely unaware of the argument culture that is all around them and how they perpetuate it, often unknowingly in their own company culture. One place the argument culture creates the most damage is in growth through learning and feedback. When the argument culture enters your startups it brings with it the energy of war. War by its very nature involves annihilation of people or ideas followed by a period of rebuilding and growth. It creates a culture of criticism, fear, and defensiveness that does not allow us to efficiently collaborate and execute on the best possible solution.
If you truly want to empower your vision and your team with a passionate forward driving momentum than you must supersede above and beyond the argument culture the joint goals that unite the startup. Once the goal supersedes the winning or loosing of a specific argument than the focus automatically shifts to giving, receiving, and synergizing actionable feedback. Teams that give and receive actionable feedback are the most agile and fast; two critical factors at that allow startups to succeed.