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Just over a year ago, I launched my own business - Praeva Partners, a next generation executive search firm. And like anyone launching a new company, I had a fairly long list of things I wanted to get right. Right near the top was culture. I was going to build something different. A business where people genuinely enjoyed working together, supported each other and felt like they were building something they could be proud of.
Naturally, I decided the answer lay within a really beautiful PowerPoint presentation full of buzzwords and colours. Fortunately, I got distracted and never finished it. As it turns out, that might have been one of my better leadership decisions.
A quick introduction. I’ve worked in executive search for almost two decades, starting as a researcher and eventually becoming Chief Executive of an investor-backed business, before taking the plunge and launching Praeva Partners. Along the way, I’ve learned quite a few lessons. Some through good decisions, others through getting things spectacularly wrong. This is the first edition of Lessons From A Headhunter, where I’ll be sharing some of those experiences, in the hope that they’re useful (or at least mildly entertaining) for others on a similar journey.
If you work in executive search, lead a business, or are responsible for building and developing senior leadership teams, hopefully there’ll be something here for you. And if not, feel free to tell me in the comments. I’m developing quite a thick skin.
We all know culture is important, right? We’ve also all experienced what happens when it isn’t quite working. When the company values plastered across the walls bear absolutely no resemblance to how people actually behave. When the leadership team proudly describes the business as “collaborative, dynamic and empowering”, while everyone else is secretly updating their LinkedIn profiles. It’s grim, and it happens all too often.
As a headhunter, I’ve spent years assessing whether candidates will fit the culture of an organisation. It’s consistently one of the most important considerations in senior hiring, but also one of the hardest to properly quantify. How do you know someone is going to fit? Will they complement the existing team, challenge it constructively, or upset the entire apple cart? There are tools that help, but much of it still comes down to experience, observation and knowing what you’re actually looking for.
Which is why, having spent nearly 20 years assessing other people’s cultures, I thought I’d have a reasonably good idea how to build one myself. Spoiler alert: I didn’t.
A few years ago, MIT Sloan published some fascinating research into corporate values and whether employees actually experience what their employers claim to stand for. The results weren’t particularly flattering. The researchers found little relationship between companies’ stated values and how employees rated the businesses against those values. In some areas, including collaboration, the relationship was actually negative. In other words, shouting about how collaborative you are doesn’t necessarily make you collaborative. Who knew?
I remember reading this during one of my ADHD-inspired research rabbit holes and physically wincing. Because I’d been part of the problem. I’ve sat in boardrooms where inspirational nouns were enthusiastically scribbled onto whiteboards. I’ve delivered Town Halls explaining how these carefully selected words represented everything we stood for. And I’ve watched as precisely nothing changed on Monday morning.
Yet when I started planning Praeva, what was one of the first things I did? Started putting together a company values deck, obviously. There are some wonderfully clichéd statements buried in a version one somewhere. More red flags than a Formula One pile-up.
Then the business launched. Daria joined, followed by Talia, then Annie. Clients needed looking after, searches needed delivering, and the usual chaos of building a business took over. Every now and then I’d remind myself that we really needed to “formalise the culture”. But the presentation remained unfinished. Thank God.
Because, while I was busy worrying about how to create our culture, something rather interesting was happening. The team was creating it themselves. I think the moment I properly realised this was when I went on holiday. Leaving your relatively new business in the hands of other people is an interesting experience. You tell yourself you’re going to switch off, while secretly wondering how many times your phone is going to ring. Except mine barely did.
People stepped up. They supported each other, made decisions, took real ownership and just got on with it. Not because I’d delivered a rousing speech about accountability. Not because we’d agreed that “Act Like an Owner” should be written in large letters on a wall. But because that’s how they genuinely approached working together. And when I thought about it, I’d been seeing the same behaviour for months.
Of course, we disagree. Quite regularly, actually. But what strikes me is that our disagreements are almost always about the best way to achieve the same outcome. Not who gets the credit. Not whose client it is. Not whose opinion carries the most weight. Just different people, with different perspectives, trying to work out the best way forward. We’re not always going to agree on the route, but we all believe in the destination.
And that, for me, is when it really clicked. We hadn’t needed to tell people what our culture should be. It was already happening.
I should probably clarify something here. I’m not suggesting the secret to building a great culture is to do absolutely nothing, go on holiday and hope for the best. Although, admittedly, that would be a very attractive management philosophy. What I’ve come to understand is that you can’t manufacture culture, but you can create the conditions for it to grow. And looking back, there were a few things we did deliberately that made a real difference.
The first was our business model. Now, anyone who’s spent time in executive search will know that it’s an industry where individual incentives can sometimes create some fairly interesting behaviours. Fee ownership, internal competition, arguments over credit – these all combine to make for a potentially difficult and even nasty workplace. I’ve seen plenty of examples over the years where the way people are rewarded actively works against the behaviours a business claims it wants to encourage. There’s only so much collaboration you can preach when two people are arguing over who gets the fee.
So, when designing Praeva, I was determined to remove as much of that friction as possible. We don’t arbitrate revenue between individuals. Our model is designed around team success and delivering the best possible outcome for clients, rather than encouraging people to build their own little empires. Does that create a brilliant culture by itself? Absolutely not. But it’s step in the right direction. I firmly believe it’s much easier to build one when your commercial model isn’t actively fighting against you.
The second thing was recognising that culture is reflected in hundreds of small decisions, rather than a handful of grand gestures. Our benefits are a good example. We’re an adventurous bunch. People love travelling, taking holidays and planning their next trip. So, we introduced flexible leave and the ability to work from abroad for 10 days a year, without eating into annual leave. We’re also at stages of life where families and planning for the future matter, so we’ve invested in family leave, private healthcare and pensions.
None of these things are particularly revolutionary. But they reflect the people in our business and the environment we’re trying to create, rather than being lifted from a generic list of “10 benefits employees really want”. The same goes for how we spend time together. We all work in the office two days a week. Those days are generally loud, busy, productive and full of people taking the mickey out of each other. People come in because they enjoy being together. It’s fun – but not because I say so, because it actually is. You can’t really enforce that approach to being in the same space with a hybrid-working policy.
There’s another area where I’ve taken a slightly different approach: alcohol. I’m now six years sober, which has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’m healthier, happier, and considerably less likely to embarrass myself at a Christmas party. But my own experience has also made me think differently about how businesses build relationships.
I’ve worked in plenty of environments where socialising was almost entirely built around drinking. And while I’ve got nothing against people enjoying a few drinks, I do think there’s a tendency in some businesses to confuse drinking culture with company culture. Throw the company credit card behind the bar and – ta-dah! – team building. Personally, I think that’s a bit of a cop-out.
At Praeva, we’ve tried to be more creative. We’ve survived a VR zombie apocalypse, battled over lurid pink teddy bears at fairground games, and we’re gearing up for clay pigeon shooting. Some of these experiences have been mildly ridiculous. All of them have been fun. But more importantly, they’re shared experiences that give people something to laugh about, talk about and remember. And nobody has to drink to feel part of the team.
Again, none of this guarantees a great culture. But it’s another example of making small, deliberate choices that reflect the sort of business we want to be.
So, what have I actually learned? A year ago, I thought building a great culture meant defining what it should look like, writing it down, and then encouraging everyone to live by it. What I’ve realised is that I had things slightly backwards. Culture isn’t a set of words, or an away day, or a particularly inspiring PowerPoint presentation. It’s the hundreds of small interactions that take place every day.
It’s what happens when someone needs help. It’s how people behave when something goes wrong. It’s whether colleagues genuinely celebrate each other’s successes. And it’s what happens when the boss goes on holiday. As leaders, we can influence all of those things. We can hire thoughtfully, remove unnecessary friction, reward the right behaviours and set an example. But ultimately, culture belongs to the people who experience and shape it every day.
I should also add that we’re still a young business, with a team approaching 10 people. I’m under no illusion that maintaining what we’re building as we grow will be straightforward. In fact, I’ll probably be writing a future edition about how I managed to screw it up as we scaled.
But for now, there’s something quite reassuring about knowing that we didn’t need a finished presentation to create an environment people genuinely care about. And although we have now defined our company values, I’d wager that most of the team would struggle to recite all five. Ask them what it feels like to work at Praeva, though, and I think you’d hear a remarkably consistent answer. That’s the difference between imposing a culture and building one together.
Perhaps the best test of your company culture isn’t what happens when you’re in the office. It’s what happens when you’re not.
I thought building culture was about coming up with clever company values and persuading everyone to embrace them. Turns out, it’s much more about creating the right conditions and letting people build something together. And if you’re wondering whether your culture is really working, try going on holiday. You might learn more from what doesn’t happen than anything written on your office walls.
I’d love to hear how others have approached this. Have you deliberately built a culture from the top down, or found that the best parts emerged without you planning them? And if anyone has managed to create a brilliant culture entirely through PowerPoint, please do send me the deck.
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