In large organizations, culture is key. The values and habits of an organization, and what it rewards and punishes, are the background radiation driving towards discrete outcomes in a world of infinite possibility.

Your culture is a living thing – it changes and adapts to new teammates, external forces, and the broader environment. And sometimes it gets sick; sometimes your culture gets a virus.

A Culture Virus is a contagious idea that hooks into your culture like a pathogen, passing from person to person, and very often preying on the weak and struggling – the people who are susceptible to convenient excuses.

Below we’ll work through examples of common culture viruses that can occur as companies grow. These elements of culture aren’t matters of style – if you let them creep into your company, they will meaningfully deflate, devalue, and debase your company.

Culture Virus Examples

Culture Virus One: Lack of accountability

Lack of accountability is the most common culture virus in existence. The most common and problematic cause for a lack of accountability is when organizations don’t have easy ways to understand whose fault something is. As organizations grow, often they’ll transform into something where the specific outcomes for the business can be divorced from people’s day-to-day work.

On software teams, long build times are a common cause here: I delivered my thing 4 months ago, it’s not my fault they screwed it up downstream; I got bad requirements, look upstream for the problem. Sometimes build times are so long you can just blame people who aren’t at the company anymore.

Another common case is people gaslighting the company about the difficulty of their job – you know what outcomes they own, but they always claim it was so much more difficult than you imagine. This is particularly problematic in roles where skills are specialized or isolated, and when it’s done to the level where it never is quite bad enough to go dive in and figure out just how difficult the role is.

This virus reaches a fever pitch in two modes:

• When teams just constantly blame other teams for everything, constantly.
• When there’s so little accountability that teams never blame other teams, because nobody is being held to account for anything. Often the company sees that kind of civility as evidence things are going well, because people fighting becomes the only short-term metric they have for inter-team collaboration. As a result, this failure mode is actually worse.

Culture Virus