This is a three-part series of articles on building, growing and supporting company culture — something the teams at Kin, DoneDone.com and We Are Mammoth have all wrestled with over the last eight-plus years. This article, the first in the series, discusses how a startup’s culture can survive its initial phases of growth.
Few things can be as rewarding as watching a company you helped found grow and thrive. The flip side to this growth though, feels a lot like the growing pains we all experienced right around middle school: Internal and external forces put enormous strain on an identity that proves much more malleable than we would have guessed.
For small companies, this awkward phase tends to land around the time employee No. 20 is hired. It’s in that range that founders are no longer able to keep track of what everyone is doing, that the first team members take on leadership roles, and that habits calcify into key components of company culture.
Small teams will ignore that last transformation at their own peril.
“As something intangible, it can be easy for establishing and maintaining a suitable company culture to be bypassed in favor of seemingly more urgent priorities,” Sarah Willis writes at TalentCulture.
Willis notes that mismanaging company culture at this stage can lead to a whole variety of foundational weaknesses: Potential recruits are put off, existing employees become disengaged and total productivity dips.
While they’re not guarantees of pain-free growth, establishing a vision and core values at a company will help guide the company habits that soon become company culture.
The Importance of Establishing Values Early
Kin’s product manager, Craig Bryant, wrote about a practice called “visioning” back in 2013: Imagining and documenting how you think a company will look at a specific point in the future if every team member gives 100% effort and every process developed is reliably solid.
Creating a company vision helps inform a core set of values and goals that everyone on the team can adopt. This roadmap helps build and solidify a company’s personality, the thing so malleable during an early stage of growth.
Here are a few questions to ask during this process of establishing values, courtesy of the team at Lighthouse:
- “What are the habits everyone follows?
- “How do you celebrate wins? (Do you?)
- “How are failures handled?
- “What does the team do to find joy in their work?
- “How do you communicate?
- “Are problems resolved or swept under the rug?”
Be thoughtful in your answers to those questions, and in how you analyze your answers to those questions. These are the values you will want to scale alongside your processes and your customer base.
Identifying Those Same Values in Potential Hires
“The people you invite into your company to extend and expand its capabilities ARE YOUR CULTURE,” Homebrew partner Hunter Walk writes. “If you can interview for these qualities and show the discipline to not hire people who lack or are in opposition to these attributes, then you have a foundation that will solidify over time. One which will make the successive hires and functioning of the team easier.”
This often frustrates team members who are in charge of hiring, though, who follow some commonly shared advice about hiring for culture fit. “Culture fit” confuses cause and effect. Instead, they will want to determine whether a potential hire fits their company’s values.
“There is no one interview question you can ask to find out for sure if a candidate is a fit with your values,” 15Five CEO David Hassell writes at TechCrunch. “The key is to ask questions about the candidate’s personal and professional lives and try to understand why they have made the decisions they did.”
Of course, these potential hires will also need to understand what a company stands for right up front. The company’s website, blog and social media outlets are perfect for communicating a company’s values and a company’s personality to potential applicants, Glassdoor’s Head of Global Recruiting Will Stanley writes.
“Rather than simply listing corporate values, be creative and share stories that demonstrate those values put in action. For instance, post brief interviews with current employees sharing examples of how the company’s team celebrates successes together or exactly how it is a family-friendly workplace.”
Overcoming Breakpoints
As a company continues to grow, it will encounter many breakpoints that force leaders to step back and think about bigger issues than a company’s day-to-day operations and spend more time communicating with their team, and re-iterating the company’s vision and values.
“As your company grows, your people need more attention than you can give them, which is why developing leaders in your organization is so important,” they write. “Your leaders, your first layers of managers, need to emerge at this time so they can start taking care of your people working so hard to make the company succeed. And the single best tool for any leader is the one-on-one.”
The Northridge Group’s Vice President of Human Capital, Terri Burke, stresses the importance of clear communication at this stage.
“Transparency is critical,” she writes. “Be clear about the plan and vision for the company. Give the ‘what’ and the ‘why.’ Share expectations and measure desired business outcomes while embracing the diversity of thought as employees share their point of view. Communicate consistently. Personal, departmental or organizational feedback should be shared. As organizations become increasingly remote, it becomes more essential than ever that all employees feel included and part of the organization.”
“Keeping that warm, family feeling as you grow requires a commitment to the staff and the customers that comes from the very top,” small business owner Mary Liz Curtin tells the Wall Street Journal.
“If the owners and managers of a business work to keep their staff, and customers feel special, appreciated and respected, that attitude will resonate throughout the business no matter how large it gets.”
Small Giants and Lean Startups
Startups, which by their very nature embrace rapid growth, follow a model that looks much more like a controlled explosion when they successfully scale. But the fundamental business principle of embracing a set of values still applies.
“Profit and expansion aren’t the only lightning-speed factors startup leaders need to worry about,” Kate L. Harrison writes at Forbes. “Because industries and their respective technologies and consumers also evolve at a rapid pace, startups must establish and cheerlead core values to maintain stability for their team and maintain focus on the core mission.”
Walter Chen at the iDoneThis blog uses the example of Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Zingerman’s founders, Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig, increased their company’s revenue by an order of magnitude ($5 million to $50 million) by translating its company values into an innovative organizational structure.
“So in 1994, with the deli producing $5 million in annual revenue, the founders sat down and wrote their vision statement for what they called ‘Zingerman’s Community of Businesses,’ a loosely organized group of local businesses under the Zingerman’s umbrella that gave its employees an opportunity to become partners,” Chen writes.
“Each ZCoB business would be founded and operated by a Zingerman’s employee-turned managing partner who had gone through extensive in-house training on Zingerman’s company culture, values, and how it does business. Both the managing partner and Zingerman’s would contribute capital to get the business going. The result is a bunch of small startups based on the Zingerman’s company culture and brand, all based locally in Ann Arbor.”
At the time of Chen’s writing, the Zingerman’s community boasted 650 employees and 18 managing partners.
images by:
José Martín
Tante Tati
StartupStockPhotos