Culture in scale-ups
COMPANY CULTURE is not the first topic you spend your day-to-day thoughts on when leading a start-up. With only 4 questions I help you pragmatically constructing a cultural strategy. A must for growth towards a healthy scale-up!
Culture in most start-ups is a natural process, mostly driven by the founder(s), the CEO or a the small team. In the start-up phase, you work together with a limited amount of people to make the business a success. In any start-up you feel the “hungry for success” vibes. You have a clear goal together and you want to succeed as a team. The leader has a big impact on the culture, often a reflection of the personality and the leadership style of that person.
A leader can bring focus, happiness and inspiration. Or chaos, negativity and demotivation. Or anything in between. Or a mix of everything.
When your start-up grows to a scale-up, a lack of strategy in your company culture becomes more and more visable. Your team has grown and unity is not the default anymore, alignment is more difficult and employees start to detach from the leadership team.
This is why you need to have a clear cultural strategy from the very beginning. It’s a wapon to grow healthy, to get the most from your team, retain and attract people and to grow further after the scale-up phase.
Let me help you with 4 questions of which the answers construct the foundation of your culture.
1. Which cultural values will make your company grow?
2. Who is responsible for what?
3. Which topics are important for employee satisfaction?
4. Which activities / processes will activate your culture?
- The first thing you’ll notice is that you will choose values that are close to your personal values and nature. That is ok. But challenge yourself with: what kind of company do you really want to run? How do you differentiate from your competitors as a brand and employer? What kind of employees do you want to attract and what do they need to be the best version of themselves? Make sure to activate your values. So not: “perseverance”, but “we persevere”. Choose values that are close to your company but let (some of) them challenge you and the employees to be better. Don’t go over 3 max 4 values and make sure you explain your values with behaviour to prevent multiple interpretations of the value.
- When you have clarity about your values, it’s not a given that these values are recognised in your business. The worst thing you can do is define values, introduce them with a big bang to the team and don’t do anything with it. Values need activation, otherwise they are just words on the wall.
And who is responsible for that? One no-brainer: lead by example. Especially in start-ups and scale-ups the leader has a big impact. But.. the bigger the company, the more importance managers have in this. They are the team’s daily contact, they “make” the culture in their team. So make sure you have a plan: who is responsible for what in the company culture? What do you expect from HR, communication, R&D, service, the managers, the leaders, the employees? Write. It. Down. That is why it’s called a cultural STRATEGY.
The worst thing you can do is define values, introduce them with a big bang to the team and don’t do anything with it.
- Culture is a complex thing. It reflects in all layers of the organisation. We tend to think about what we need from the employees and what we want to reflect on our customers. But before you come up with activities to grow your culture, look at what your employees need, especially in daily operations. Do they need autonomy? Do they need visibility? Do they need to celebrate success? Do they need flexibility?
- Now you know your values, you know who is responsible and which topics are important to tackle; it’s time to work on an activation list! What are you going to do to make your culture alive and kickin’? If one of your values is ‘innovation’ (which is more of a hygiene factor these days, but ok), then make sure you are innovative in all elements of your company. Not only with your product, but also in your HR policy. Or if one of your values is ‘surprising’, then make sure you surprise in every aspect on the way. Make sure new colleagues get noticed about the core values in the onboarding process and make it part of the day-to-day business for everybody. Breath you culture.
Even for my little one-man-show called ey’yo, I have set up my core values. Because values are a compass to act. If I would have started my business without values, I would just do what comes to mind. I can go in any direction. My values make me think about the next steps I should take to grow my business, to have a positive impact, to create that reputation that I would like my company to have.
