How to Cultivate a High Performing Culture

Building a company is one of the hardest things you can do, with cultivating a high-performing culture at a close second. That’s where our secret weapon comes in, Define’s head of people Karsten Vagner, who has scaled several companies from their early days to teams of several hundred people. Here we're sharing his first-hand experience and sage advice on many challenges that early-stage founders face with their team.

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Q: Our clinical team is growing quickly. They are not ‘tech startup’ people like the rest of our employees, and the work they do is separate from the rest of the team. What’s the right amount of information to give our clinical team about the company, and what’s the best way to communicate with them?

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A: This is a common question that comes up when a company is scaling its clinical team. Though your clinicians may not be looking at the same kind of metrics as the rest of the company, it’s important they understand your company’s goals and how their work contributes to them. Not understanding how the company mission and company business model work together is a leading cause of attrition on these teams. 

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You may need to provide more context than you normally would with employees who have experience working at startups. But if you help your clinical team understand what your goals are, why those are the goals, and how they can help hit those goals, you will be in good shape.

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The best way to communicate with clinical teams really depends on your company culture and norms. You may want to include them in your regular all hands meetings, or share recordings of those meetings with them if they don’t all work at the same time. You may want to have separate all hands meetings for clinicians, or emails that go out just to that team on a regular basis. Your communication cadence and channels will likely evolve as you grow, but the goal of keeping your clinical team informed in a way they can understand is a winning strategy.

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Q: Our company has grown a lot. How can we get visibility into making sure our corporate and our clinical teams are hitting their goals?

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A: Make sure the goals people have are incredibly clear. The goal setting process does not need to be overengineered or complex. People in every role should have specific goals that accomplish three things:

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• Goals should ladder up to your company goals
• Each goal should be measurable, without ambiguity (use words like ‘Build,’ ‘Deliver,’ and ‘Produce’)
• Each goal should be timebound and have clear deadlines (end each goal with ‘by X date’)

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Salespeople (revenue, sales activity) and recruiters (offer acceptance rate, number of hires) tend to have goals that are naturally measurable. So can clinicians, depending on what you’re measuring. Whether it’s NPS, number of appointments in a certain period, or an efficiency/speed metric, make sure these goals are clear to them. 

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Once the words in your goals are clear and people know what is expected of them and why, measuring success will become much easier.

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Q: What is one thing we can do to make sure performance reviews are effective for our team? 

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A: Make sure that everyone is giving useful feedback. This is one of the biggest opportunities to increase your company’s performance.

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Useful feedback skips the general praise or criticism for specific insights with examples. Imagine receiving the feedback that “You need to work on your communication skills.” Not very useful because it doesn’t direct you how to improve, and feels open to interpretation. 

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Instead, imagine hearing, “On our last few client calls with Client X over Q4, I noticed that our clients told us they had a list of questions for us, but we never got to them because you shared slides for more than half the call, and didn’t ask them any follow up questions while you were presenting. You can manage our time with clients better by giving them the opportunity to tell us their priorities at the start of the call, and then being thorough and concise as we tick through those issues. This will show our clients that you are listening to them as opposed to talking at them, and will strengthen their trust in you.” 

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Don’t get caught up in the performance review tools, process, or timing. Just make sure people know exactly how to bring their A game every day.

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