Company Growth Only Succeeds With Culture
Building startups for the company builder finleap as CEO and New Venture Partner in Berlin taught me one key learning: Culture is one of the most important success factors for building a fast-growing company.
Why company culture is so important
“Culture is something for bigger companies. We need a great product and sales first!” — Nope!
It does not matter if you run your business as a one-man-show, if you are a member of the founding team or if you take over as a CEO. Whenever things are not working or not showing results over a longer period of time, in most of cases the root cause is a lack of “the right culture”.
“Culture grows over the time and we will focus on this little bit later. A cultural change needs too much time, we need results now!“ — Nope!
Especially in fast-growing companies, a culture problem can slightly kill your performance very fast and it‘s super hard to fix it later. When key players or leaders consistently behave in the „wrong way“ — when you have never-ending and recurring discussions about what are the right things to do and how to do it — when you feel each day is a fight and nothing fits together — THEN YOU HAVE A CULTURE PROBLEM.
The problem is, that when you reached this point, it‘s already too late. Now, re-starting is super painful, demanding, expensive, and time-consuming. This is why before you start doing anything as a founder or CEO, you should make up your mind in which cultural framework you want to build or reshape your company.
Define the “right” company culture
When I reflect on very successful companies, on their leadership styles and cultures, I don‘t see that there is a blueprint for the „right culture“ to build a successful company. It does not matter if a company is top-down or democratic, or if you have a growth or a performance culture. It does not matter if you have one product genius or a cross-functional product design team, or if you have an outstanding founder or CEO.
No matter what the culture is, culture must be super clear for every team member and the culture must be lived consistently in day-to-day business. This helps you to attract the right kind of people that really fit into your company and you will also have a positive impact on your team stickiness.
Avoid ending up with the basics when it comes to culture
The vision and mission of the company must be clear before you start building your culture. Ask yourself „which culture is needed to achieve the vision?“ What will make us unique in the market as a company — not as a product! Is it creativity, execution, speed, innovation, love in the details, scaling automated processes, customer service quality, …?
Food for thoughts when you are faced with a pivot:
“Pivoting to a new company vision, often means that you also have to iterate your culture. Maybe you even need a new team to make the new culture happen…”
Also, avoid the typical set of values, you can read everywhere. Values like trust, transparency, diversity, passion, boldness, excellence. This is what comes up from those big and generic team workshops. Define emotional differentiators on top of the basics. You won’t make a real difference in your company culture if you just pick the basics.
Write down 5 core values or statements and some concrete examples per value what this means in typical daily work situations and how colleagues should behave. Also, have some negative examples per value that should not happen as well. This is your company culture playbook, but keep it simple: Only one slide per value including the examples.
“Make up your mind what is the desired culture for the next level of your company. Defining the culture with all team members might not be the best idea.”
Discuss the draft playbook with your network. Make a conscious choice of who should finally be part of the culture-building team of your company, that will make the final call on the values and the storytelling behind it. If you need to change the current culture, it‘s not a good idea to involve everyone in this.
Good storytelling is better than team workshops
Instead of generating company values altogether in team workshops, invest time in good and authentic storytelling why you exactly go with the selected values. Especially, why they are so crucial for achieving the company vision.
Co-developing values and statements in a culture-building team save you from being completely wrong. You don’t need to involve everyone in team workshops to start building a culture.
Cultivate values and culture
All leaders have to regularly work on „cultivating the desired culture“. Their impact and performance on growing the „right culture“ should be measured in the same way as all the other business metrics and KPIs in your company.
“Every single leader has to feel how good or bad he is doing on creating the right culture in comparison to peers”
Ensure that mandatory culture checks are done in all hiring interviews. No candidate should be hired whenever there are doubts or question marks on core values — regardless of the person’s track record or professional expertise.
Most important hiring rule:
”Cultural fit over professional expertise and experience”
Take people out of the team in case there is a cultural misfit. Supervisors should give a very detailed and emotional explanation to the team why they made the call. Make this kind of negative storytelling also part of the “right” culture.
Ensure that every single team member gets feedback on how he lives the company values — once a month! This can be super informal, e.g. just some spoken comments during a coffee break — by supervisors, peers, or colleagues, and maybe also from customers. Broaden the feedback channels.
Make “culture top performers” visible! Establish some nice rituals where you can praise individual behavior that fuels the right culture. Make colleagues and the leadership team proud of what they did and make everyone jealous of getting the same rewards, nice words, and unexpected incentives in front of all.
