Lukas Kröpfl

Tooling to build high performing organizations.

Communication

Building a great culture always starts with communication. When people work together, they must communicate one-on-one, in work streams, teams, divisions, departments, and across the whole organization. A culture of communication means everyone recognizes how misinformation damages productivity.

In hierarchical organizations, communication happens vertically, horizontally, or laterally — both formally and informally.

Vertical communication feels natural and typically occurs between direct reports and managers with one-level hop intervals. Horizontal communication becomes more formal as the audience and hop interval increase, which can reduce communication frequency.

The most critical form is horizontal communication exceeding single-level hops and lateral communication. Those sharing information should validate assumptions about existing misinformation and deliver what actually helps.

Lateral communication — such as engineers talking regularly with sales directors — requires structure. "Buddy teams" are virtual cross-departmental groups that meet regularly to discuss problems and ideas while combating Conway's law.

Improving meetings is a practical first step, as they're where most organizational communication occurs.

Feedback

Feedback deserves dedicated attention as "the primary tool to improve each other." Netflix exemplifies strong feedback culture.

Building effective feedback culture requires behavior-focused (not identity-attacking) and observation-based (not evaluative) approaches. People must practice this skill through company-wide training and group rehearsals.

Collaboration

After feedback is given, it must be actioned through collaboration. Teams working together create value exceeding individual contributions.

While team-level collaboration improves efficiency, cross-team collaboration is trickier. Facebook's approach — "Nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem" — encourages vertical and lateral teamwork when genuinely enforced.

Trust and Safe Failure

Collaboration requires structures, processes, and guidelines. Writing these down forces deep thinking and prevents suboptimal rules.

However, smart individuals often outperform predefined processes. Organizations need trust beyond formal structures. Leaders should set goals and define outcomes, letting workers determine approaches.

This model requires psychological safety. When people fear mistakes, productivity plummets. With good feedback and communication systems, errors shouldn't repeat multiple times.

Leadership

Organizations should create environments where leadership is promoted and recognized. Leadership groups should expand by empowering people to become leaders without becoming managers.

So What?

Reaching ideal culture requires substantial effort and time. Building a great organization that creates great things requires actively living these dimensions — communication, feedback, collaboration, trust, safe failure, and leadership — not just documenting them.