Value the process.

Scalable culture. Nature or nurture?

The maestro of modern day marketing, Seth Godin, sums culture up as how ‘people like us, do things like this.’ Or in other words, how a group of people think, act and speak.

Makes sense. But should ‘like us’ and ‘things like this’ ever change? Or are they constant? Should we continually try to shape new hires to fit our founding culture? Or should we embrace change in order to respond and represent new attitudes and behaviours as our business evolves and when we hire?

Unsurprisingly, we’d argue that authentic, high-performance cultures do both simultaneously.

So how do we get the nature / nurture balance right as we grow? Success and failure lies in the process of creating and implementing your values.

Your values should draw on the culture you’ve created as founders — i.e. this is a top-down approach based on your fundamental nature as a business. AND you should empower your team (as it grows) to drive new executional practices which map to your commercial needs — this is a bottom-up strategy that allows your team to nurture and develop the culture.

What to think about when building out your values?

• Ensure you involve a wide representation of people from each department when you are developing or refining your values. Include product, marketing, customer success, people people etc… Not just the founders.
• Outsource the building out of ‘practices’ to your entire team i.e. the rules, rituals, processes and rewards that operationalise each value.
• Revisit your values every 2–3 years to ensure they are still fit for purpose. In fast moving high growth companies, your needs will evolve as the business scales.

This way you keep the core nature of your culture alive whilst giving you the necessary flex to nurture future growth.