The Culture Conundrum: Managing Scale, Growth, and Ever-evolving Culture (hint...you’ll need more bathrooms)

Recently, I’ve taken time to reflect on the challenges that emerged as our company rapidly scaled and the resulting conflicts that grew between culture and growth.  

The Culture Conundrum

Culture and growth will inherently conflict as a culture-forward company comes in contact with the need for process and change as it scales. The two can coexist, but culture that comes easy with 50 employees is not so easy at 300, and that is an inherent truth of growth a leader will fight every day, every month, and every year moving  forward.  But a healthy culture is not Nerf guns or free beer. “Culture is the by-product of consistent behavior,” and you need to take action to steward the culture you want while also maintaining it.  To be clear, you should never lose sight of the foundation that built a great company, but as the business scales and evolves, you will need to also grow and evolve your culture.

Companies with a strong culture achieve it by instilling the values deeply in all employees. A successful culture must be carried, protected, and owned by each and every employee. However, as you scale, you may experience resistance to even the smallest of changes that could infringe on the current culture. If left unaddressed,  culture can be a virus as a company scales or shifts to a new stage of growth.

What Happens When Culture Impacts The Path To Growth?

One of the biggest challenges facing companies with a great culture is the danger of employees leaning on the culture as a way to ignore, resist, or impact the need for the business to evolve as it scales. This ‘head in the sand’ attitude does not recognize that the evolution of culture is a fundamental part of growth and reflects  the maturity of the company culture.

How to Spot the Warning Signs

The most telling sign of culture obstacles is when you hear the phrase…“that is not part of our culture” when asked about any new process, requirement, or change to the business.

Other warning signs include:

•       Expressing a desire to be the same as when the company was small
•       Lack of recognition of the need for basic business goals such as revenue, profit, products, etc
•       Pushing culture to the extreme when the privileges you have allowed as a company (unlimited PTO, beer, work from home) turn to entitlement and in small outliers result in abuse of the perk

Tips  for  Scaling Culture

Separate elements of culture icons from the foundations of culture. If you can’t tell the difference then a larger issue exists. The genesis of the culture conundrum often results from the confluence of the physical elements of culture (ping pong, flip-flops, flexible work) with the core elements of what makes the company great (talent, putting people first, the work). Companies that take the time to recognize this separation and truly identify the core attributes of the culture, and not just the symbols of culture, will have an easier time steering clear of the culture conundrum.

One of the most impactful approaches to avoiding these issues is to focus on identifying and branding the 2-3 core elements of a company culture. Once this foundation is defined and embraced by the company, you can build whatever is needed around it to sustain the business and a healthy culture.

Things Will Break

Another valuable lesson learned while experiencing hyper growth is that everything breaks. Every system or process we had in place for the first 100 employees began  to stress at 200 and then break at 300. I deeply valued our flat organizational structure and did not want to over-process the company. But, once we accepted that  things ‘breaking’ was a positive sign of growth, we looked for indications of stress and used those as triggers to identify and enhance our process and structure. This kept us flat and fast moving and allowed the leadership to implement  much-needed structure as we remained one step ahead of complete chaos.

A lesson on hiring: Hire people that will embrace the way you are running the company and be a part of the growth. As we grew, the ‘fly by the seat of the pants’ people matured as they learned to understand the needs of the company. If you find someone who will not or can not grow and evolve with the company?, you need to have the courage to exit unaligned employees.

There Will be Blind Spots

I fully admit that we failed to see everything coming and I take ownership of the oversight. The ramp-up and growth curve was more rapid and steep than I realized and this put us behind on taking action on some key decisions. I was waiting for a clear picture of our growth before moving in the right direction. For example, we needed a lot more bathrooms and by the time the picture was clear, we were behind...literally!

What I Learned: 

• Get culture right and be deliberate about keeping it as you grow

• Talent becomes competitive and disruptive when faced with change

• Reaction to culture has a direct impact to the balance sheet