The best tip to grow your start-up into a successful company.

Jake was leading a tech-company of 50 men and women. There were plans to take on board another round of capital. The plans materialized and enabled his company to hire 200 people and expand to 5 new countries.

After one year, the organization ran into problems. Despite ongoing financial growth, new clients and a general positive atmosphere, the organization had issues retaining especially their mid-layer management.

What was the issue?

Instead of hypothesing and relying on purely experience, which happens to be the case in a lot of cultural consultancies, we leveraged our OCS Pro scan, which enabled us to find out the following:

1.      As the organisation was growing, challenges found were related to ownership and original employees continuing to be very entrepreneurial, resulting also in a “nice, open and employee oriented” attitude among newly recruited staff.

2.      At the same time, middle-management, tasked with creating more structure, was disliked by normal staff for trying to change the organisational culture to become more mature, enhanced by the fact that the same people (founders) which hired the middle-management to enable the organisation to become more structured (needed to ensure regulatory compliance)- themselves undermined the attempts to make the organisation more structured – as it negatively impacted their own “freedom to be entrepreneurial”.

What did we end up doing?

1.      We visualized (analyzed) to which extent the members of the executive team “walked the talk”

2.      We enabled a reshuffle of the management team – resulting in the MT member which most of all “walked the talk” becoming CEO to set the example. Jake took on a new role and became the Chief Growth Officer and various of the other MT members formed a “growth team”.

Why did this work?

Ownership does not equate management. When an organization changes and needs managers (e.g. to secure compliance with regulations), the same behavior which enabled an organization to grow, will turn against it (think e.g. the example of Uber) – it will need to “grow up”. If ownership doesn′t want that – it becomes the bottleneck.

Luckily, in our case example the ownership realized that their “baby” could grow much faster with much better results when being led by others managing it.  Bringing non-judgmental data to the table enabled the owners to critically reflect on what they really wanted:

Equity becoming more worthy and not loosing personal freedom.

The key to measuring the impact of #theculturefactor is not to use it to judge “right or wrong”. But to use it to strategically, and clinically reflect on how to best leverage it.

Contact us for more information, should you find yourself in a similar situation.