Harnessing Your Culture for Growth

Business growth is a beautiful thing, as a business owner, we get to experience the joy of seeing our ideas and hard work flourish. However, growth brings unique challenges, typically the business we have built to this stage, is not quite the one we need to push into the future.

?In this blog, we'll explore the ways in which the demands your business faces will evolve through growth and help you consider how to anticipate and proactively address the people issues associated, so you have the right type and tone of behaviours you need to help your business soar.?

Common growing pains

·?????? Cultural Misalignment: It’s very common for the intimate, familial environment of a small company may face strain as it transforms into a larger, more complex business. This shift requires careful management to ensure that the foundational sense of connection to the business mission and visibility or influence with business leaders is intact. The mechanisms for communication and colleague listening may change, as may the mission to some extent, but creating a consistent feeling of connection and being heard and valued are key.

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·?????? Leadership Approach Mismatch: As a company grows, leadership dynamics must adapt to the new landscape. The leadership style that drove success in a smaller setting may not be suitable moving forward. Often founder led business initially harness a rather directive style, where the senior leaders have high degrees of visibility and input into decisions and actions taken day to day. This works in a small team with small reach. But as the business grows, it risks suppressing your talent. Meaning the senior team burn out or miss the change to fully leverage new opportunities, as they are caught up the detail. Leaders must evolve, embracing change and guiding the team through different phases of growth. Proactively mapping out how your style will evolve through those stages of growth and looking to put the right people and infrastructure around you to allow you step back from the day to day is critical to success.

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·?????? Collaborative Challenges: The expansion of a company often brings an increase in role specialisms, increasing the risk of silo working and driving increased complexities in communication. ?In the early stages of growth, we don’t need to put formal effort into collaboration, a small and nimble team will often be spreading across multiple roles and priorities, making connection and co-working easier to achieve. In growth, we add specialist roles and risk silos forming, reducing the positive impact collaboration and co-creation can bring.? Consider as you add to the team, what team and management structure works for you? Is it best to organise under business functions? Can you use project teams to connect people across core deliverables in the business? How are you approaching goal setting and KPI setting to ensure it encourages co-working and collaboration?

What can you do to proactively cultivate the right culture for growth?

·?????? Define your ideal culture: Taking time to really understand the behaviours your need from your team to drive growth and then translating that into the culture you need to foster to enable those behaviours, is a critical step in proactively building the right culture for growth. ?We share our guide to defining your ideal culture and building a great culture playbook here . ?You might also find this blog on the key business factors to consider when defining your ideal culture helpful.

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·?????? Explain the change: Often as leaders in change our inherent understanding of what needs to be done and why, is something we find difficult to express in a way that colleagues can connect to. Being clear on the reasons why the culture and tone of behaviour is shifting is critical. It’s also helpful to explain how those changes will impact colleagues. The opportunities for growth, stretch and development they will create, as well as what won’t be changing and how it will feel here as we grow.

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·?????? Build your EVP and Brand: The idea of continually fostering colleagues’ knowledge of ‘what is in this for me’ is critical to their willingness to tolerate and work through the inevitable creaks and pain the system will throw at them as it evolves. Be clear on what the benefits are, both practically, but also in terms of personal experiences of and connection to their work.

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·?????? Work on your people systems and processes: Be proactive in upgrading and future proofing your people processes, to ensure they are work with you to reduce drag in critical areas. The most helpful areas to focus on first on are:

o?? Onboarding – Focusing not just on task, process and system familiarity, but also considering setting clear standards on ‘how we do things around here’, ensuring people understand the type and tone of behaviours needed to succeed.?

o?? Communication routines and system - Whether that is to support leadership visibly and context, the effective use of employee views and voice, or cross team collaboration, putting the outcomes and resources in place to keep this on point is key. ?

o?? Performance management mechanisms - Putting the foundations of great objective settings, KPIs and performance conversations. ?

Overall, the key point here is that the culture and behaviours that have got your business to where it is now, may not be the right ones move forward. ?Be conscious in identifying what great looks like for the future and be systematic in proactively evolving your business towards that. This minimises the shock and challenge of making a significant step change in behaviours once the business is already under pressure and struggling.

If you are already in place where the cultural growing pains are kicking in and you can see the misalignment in action, pause, re-set and recontract with your teams around what you need now. That will provide the foundation you need to drive the change that push things forward. ?You can evaluate your current culture and risks it presents to your growth with our free too here.