Edited highlights of our full conversation.

How are you creating your company’s culture?

Melissa Waters is the Chief Marketing Officer at Upwork. They describe themselves as the world’s work marketplace. 

For any business, if your success depends on unlocking creative thinking and innovation, you have to be competitive in the talent wars. The leadership rules for that used to be simple. Create a compelling culture built around in-person experiences. 

But how do you lead when a company’s culture is no longer built around physical space?

Tens of millions, probably billions, of the currency of your choice have been spent by business owners to build offices conducive to collaboration, creativity, and innovation.

I’ve owned some of those businesses and spent some of that money.

We did it to create a culture. To provide an environment that would help unleash the creativity of the people that worked for us and convert that into economic return.

Physical space wasn’t the only element to building a culture. Beliefs and behaviors mattered as well. But all of them were connected by the fact that, day in and day out, human beings came together and shared ideas and experiences, and learned from each other.

But without the physical structure of an office to provide the day-to-day container in which culture incubates, the responsibility to create those connections falls squarely on the leader. 

Who are your people? What do they think, care about, love, loathe? Are they happy or not? Fulfilled or not? Interested, enthused, excited or not?

Do they feel connected to what matters to the company or not?

And if your answer to any of those questions is “I don’t know,” then it might be time to ask yourself whether your leadership is adapting to the needs of today’s talent. Or not.