In the early stages of your business, culture tends to look after itself. The team is small, they joined because they are engaged with the mission, and they naturally absorb values from the founding team. But as headcount grows, and people start working in different offices and regions, how can companies keep that shared purpose and culture?
This was one of the topics at our ECI Unlocked: Performance Summit, where our keynote speaker Ronan Harrington described it as “like a DNA strand unravelling.” Ronan discussed how companies can protect their “secret sauce” as they scale, and here are 4 key things to think about:
1. Codify and communicate your “secret sauce” early?
The first step is making the invisible visible. The purpose, values and behaviours you want within your organisation need to be defined. Most large companies like Netflix and Spotify have a written down cultural design, incorporating these items alongside the company’s strategic priorities.
This then enables you to reiterate and embed the behaviours through onboarding, managerial actions, performance reviews. If you want your people to be trusted, you need to make sure managers are setting that example and not micromanaging. If you have a ‘move fast, break things’ culture as at Facebook, you can’t combine it with managers who blame team members when things go wrong. Defining what it means to work at your company is the first step to ensuring it’s ready to scale with you.
2. Culture is communication
Every new starter needs to buy into your culture. While the hope might be that your company culture is so strong they will just absorb it, this is often where cultural drift happens. Don’t forget to talk about your culture, it should be something to be proud of! Messages take a long time to land, so if you think you’re over communicating, you’re probably at about the right level.
People want to hear from leaders within the business. For example, Sion Lewis, CEO of Ciphr, regularly shares CEO Insights on LinkedIn, giving a behind-the-scenes look at the business but also communicating to Ciphr’s people about the thinking behind various product or organisational decisions. This serves a direct line of communication but brings to life their value of Authenticity to life, Sion drawing on learnings from previous roles and openly sharing both successes and areas for growth.
3. Integrate acquisitions and new geographies with care
M&A and international expansion are a turning point for company culture. Your culture is now competing with an already established way of working, a distinct localised set of values, and sometimes with international M&A, both.
Integration in either instance should never be incidental. It’s important to have trusted leaders in place within your organisation who understand the company culture and can percolate that through new offices or geographies, and to act quickly on negative behaviours that don’t reflect your business.
As Gurman Hundal, Founder of MiQ, recognised when they expanded into the US, you have to commit fully. Gurman moved to the U.S. to spearhead MiQ’s expansion and ensured that the values and culture of the ‘mothership’ were reflected. For Gurman, this meant a culture where mistakes were not discouraged, something all the more important as a satellite office where people needed to be trusted. MiQ also established a set of “anti-values” – behaviours such as ego or territorialism which were discouraged to foster a collaborative environment.
4. Reinforce culture and equip everyone to defend it
Ronan describes how one of the problems with company culture is that no one is ever formally mandated to protect it. That is why it requires everyone at a local level to feel invested enough to do it anyway. To do this you need to make sure values are made tangible through recognition and issues or feedback can be effectively surfaced.
It should be all staff, not just leaders who are engaged on this. And it should be a deciding factor in hiring, and firing, decisions. It is important to steer clear of what Ronan calls the “brilliant jerks” problem – people who deliver results but flatten morale or introduce bad behaviours into the wider pool. Toxic rockstars are difficult to manage as they bring in revenue and senior leaders often look the other way. It is important not to fall into this trap, cultural damage compounds over time, and if you haven’t defined and stuck to what you won’t tolerate, and the company culture that you initially set out to achieve may well have drifted.
