Growing Fast and Maintaining Culture
“With every hire, your culture changes to fit the added values and behaviors that each new employee brings to the table. Whether they realize it or not, every single one of your employees plays a role in shaping the larger culture of your organization. Your culture is determined by how they engage with each other and their work.” [Unknown Author]
Growing a business of any kind is a crazy ride. It is fun, and challenging, and maybe a little bit scary. I know because I was part of a team that did it. Silicon Mountain grew from 15 employees to 50 in less than a year! And that is great!
When a company is growing fast, it’s a good thing (experts say). But scaling is a challenge for companies and encompasses various “growing pains.” It is an equal challenge for leaders to keep the dynamic between employees and for the people who work at these companies to stretch and develop as quickly as needed.
It is exciting to watch the team grow from 15 people to over 50 people within a particular time frame. But how do you keep company values amidst the growth?
It is very easy to lose the grip of the company’s startup culture because there are just too many people and leadership cannot “micromanage” employees in a white-knuckle effort to maintain a startup mentality.
All textbooks say that a solid company culture is essential for the success of a business because it has a profound impact on employees, and directly affects organizational growth and many other business aspects. But how do you scale and maintain culture in young and fast-growing companies? Culture, or the underlying beliefs and values that shape an organization, can indeed be difficult to manage when a company scales. But it is possible!
In the past year, I observed the unique challenges leadership and employees of Silicon Mountain faced, as well as the successful strategies used to resolve them. Here are a few of the steps that the team took to scale culture:
We defined Silicon Mountain’s values (Honesty, People, Innovation and Passion). The first step of scaling culture is to define the company’s values, but don’t just stop at defining. We turned these values into behaviors that people can observe. For example, “people” was defined as 1) empower the individuals to be successful, 2) develop our customers and ourselves, 3) build, maintain and protect trust, and 4) be respectful of others. The output of this was a list of 9 behaviors that define our culture.
Silicon Mountain Values
Behaviors that Define Silicon Mountain Values
The purpose of that was to ensure that everyone is working from the same cultural definition and that abstract values can be seen in concrete ways.
We focus on the Employees! — Why employees? Because employees run the organization, no matter what level. This means their commitment and dedication, and their emotional connection with the organization cannot be judged as assets in monetary value.
- We significantly improved our onboarding process because it’s the best time to promote culture.
- We encourage continuous learning so employees can develop critical skills for success. In fact, Silicon Mountain supports employees to get certified in the field which they are interested in.
- We established emotional connections by utilizing Mattermost (similar to Slack) for employees to connect about work and personal interests.
We communicate the Culture Constantly and Consistently. At Silicon Mountain we hold monthly all-hands meetings where business updates are provided, milestones are celebrated and everyone is given a chance to ask questions. This simple exercise might sound trivial, but it helps demonstrate business transparency — through a culture that encourages open sharing of information and accountability at all levels. Also, it reinforces the “specific” behaviors we want team members to emulate.
We retain the Right Talent — Talent challenges are the by-product of excessive growth. The core process to attract, develop, and retain the right talent is a necessity. Hiring is about alignment around values, motivation and skill sets. It is not a company convincing a candidate to join, or a candidate convincing a company to hire him/her. It is a search for alignment between both parties. We emphasize on agile talent with the capability to solve complex issues and adjust to changing internal and external factors.
Hypergrowth can be a challenging time for a company, especially when it comes to maintaining culture. Yet, it does not mean that culture cannot be preserved during accelerated growth.
A successful company culture will not happen automatically — it needs to be designed and managed just like a product. It is part of the foundations that make a company successful.
