Growing pains or culture crisis? Four lessons to keep in mind when growing your business

Mark Zuckerberg said that growing businesses should “move fast and break things”.

This mindset during phases of organisational expansion often rewards innovation, risk taking, autonomous decision making, and favouring progress over process.

But when not kept in check, this mindset can erode organisational alignment between displayed behaviour and company values and derail any success found from growth.

Unless carefully managed, company culture can often be the first casualty in business growth and lead to catastrophic cultural failure in the long term.

A focus on values, transparency, communication, collaboration, and self-reflection are imperative when looking to grow your business in order to evolve your culture in a way that keep paces with expansion.

Four growth lessons to keep in mind

1. Engage in self-reflection

   Any organisation going through business expansion or a merger must frequently reflect on culture. Start by asking yourself the following five questions that will help to preserve culture and ensure values alignment during expansion.

   1. What distinctive cultural attributes are critical to retain as we get bigger?
   2. How well do you understand your culture now — current and desired?
   3. Where is your culture out of alignment due to expansion?
   4. What leadership and team capabilities do we need to build the right culture as we grow?
   5. How can we proactively monitor progress as we grow and sustain a healthy culture going forward?

2. Pinpoint the problems quickly

   As organisations bring in bigger sales and more headcount, it can be easy for staff to lose touch with company values, and hard for HR teams to stay on top of this shift.

   It’s important to pinpoint any problems early. Failure to maintain a desirable culture through expansion can seriously hinder an organisation, and potentially lead to high levels of turnover or a lack in employee productivity. HR teams and business leaders must maintain channels with all parts of the business to enable diagnosis and quick responses to culture issues that arise.

3. Work together

   It’s crucial that senior leaders and HR teams are aligned on how the culture of their organisation will evolve with their growing company.

   A healthy culture can only be created when senior leaders demonstrate consistent leadership role modelling.

   While it can be tricky to ensure values and behaviours are being role-modelled when new leaders are coming into the business, HR can step in at this point to ensure success. Maintaining culture through objective assessment and appropriate intervention then becomes a key job task for HR professionals.

   It’s paramount that a unified employee experience is created across the organisation and leaders are reminded of the importance of company values frequently.

4. Utilise technology

   Traditional staff surveys can often fail to capture a true representation of company culture, lulling organisations into a false sense of security.

   Organisations should look at using state of the art analytics that gets closer to employees’ deep attitudes and behaviours and provides a high-definition view of culture will quickly pinpoint both where and why any problems may be emerging as your business expands.

   Organisations that take on board the above lessons during expansion will evolve their company culture sustainably, avoiding the growing pains that get in the way of achieving success through growth.