Moulding great culture as your team grows

A great business culture is the difference between a successful thriving business and one that is mediocre at best. Every business faces day to day challenges but your culture will determine whether overcoming those challenges is enjoyable or your business being a headache to run.

There is no blueprint for a great culture, culture is situational, it starts with the companies founder and grows and evolves from there. People are the operating system of your business and as that business grows over time the operating system needs to evolve, what works when your business is a small team of 5 won’t be working when your business is a team of 100+.

Reid Hoffman – Co founder of LinkedIn identifies 5 people stages when growing a company

Family – <10 employees

Tribe – 10s of employees

Village – 100s of employees

City – 1000s of employees

Nation – 10000s of employees

In this article we’ll focus on how culture changes from founding to 100’s of employees and what you as a leader can do to ensure successful transition to the different brackets.

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Just be you (1-20)

At this early stage great business culture is a fairly easy feat. You naturally build a team of like minded people, people you get on with and like and that like you. The bonds you create with your staff due to the frequency of interactions are really strong, the team could be mistaken as a group of friends or dare I say family.

Teams at this stage are bought in because they can easily see their direct impact on the business. It’s easy to change the way the business operates quickly when your team is this small, embrace this and take full advantage of it because it’s not so easy when your team grows.

Encourage experimental behaviour in the team, you have great visibility of what works and what doesn’t at this time in your growth. Don’t let process get in your way, perhaps controversial advice that goes against the norm, but process is for later in your growth tribal knowledge will prevail and ensure a dynamic team.

Spend time with your team, it’s inexpensive to take people out when there is less than 10 of your and its invaluable time together, reduces retention issues and furthers the friends/family feel.

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Now I’ve got managers (21-49)

You’ve hit your first step change in the early 20’s of employees, it becomes harder to retain those 1-2-1 relationships with everyone as your time begins to get spread more thinly across each individual.

It’s time to start building your communication channels through managers/team leads. Working with those teams to understand how they continue to nurture talent, drive the businesses ‘Why?’ and values is a key step.

It’s time to begin establishing a framework to ensure that your message continues to be driven through the business, there are some great frameworks out there ‘EOS’ or ‘Your Most Important Number’ for example.

-????????? Establish a clear ‘Why?’ – Why does the business exist and why do you and your team turn up every day. It’s likely the reason you established the business and the team have been driving to get to this stage, it just needs formalising

• Ensure everyone has a number – It ensures that each and every individual on your team knows how they contribute to the organisation
• Don’t lose the personal touch, the team is still small enough to grab those quality moments with the team, continue to take interest in their growth and development and what they get up to day to day.

When it comes to your managers you aren’t trying to create a mini you, let the individuals share the message using their own style, when people try to mimic your style if it isn’t natural for them it’ll come off as disingenuous. The important bit is that it’s the same message.

Who’s the new guy (50+)

Now the team is beginning to be too big for you to regularly speak with each individual and a more formal process needs to be applied to ensuring a consistent culture is seen across your organisation.

By now you’ll have a communication channel established with managers taking your message and spreading it to their teams but it’s important that your voice is still heard.

• Business updates – You’ll likely have established a regular cadence to formally update the business on vision and progress, if these are quarterly or longer then some more regular cadence is a great way to reach the team. An email or even better a video to the team monthly allows your personality to shine through and for people to feel a more personal touch from their leader.
• Welcome people to the organisation – It might not be feasible to welcome each and every new employee to the business but performing monthly business orientation sessions for new starters can work well into the 100s of employees. Gather all new starters and share your vision and show why it means so much to you personally will help with buy in from your team.

?Your organisation is now large enough that a bad egg is going to slip through the net every now and then, or people will feel like they can fly under the radar with mediocre performance. Bad people have a significant impact on culture, no one wants to work their ass off if the person next to them isn’t contributing to the goal it’s deflating.

You must have a clear and fair process to deal with these individuals and remove them from the business swiftly, the remaining team players will thank you for it.

It can’t be the same the whole journey

Like it or not your company culture has to change through the journey, what works at 5 employees simply doesn’t work at 50. Culture has to grow up inline with the business and become more process and purposeful.

Protecting the culture of the business and not embracing change can be seriously detrimental to your business, I’m not suggesting you change the cultural DNA of your business, the history and values that you created early on (certainly not without good reason) but you do need to change the way in which they are expressed as you grow.

My parting piece of advice is plan ahead, change in a growing team takes time and won’t happen overnight. Celebrate and embrace change and running your business when it’s grown up and bigger will be just as enjoyable as when it is small and feels like you work with a small group of friends.

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