Why scale well?
Culture Takes Cultivation
It’s tempting to believe that as a business scales its culture will be self-regulating and stable. It won’t. Without careful nurturing it can easily lose its way, leaving behind a tale of “what might have been”. Businesses can become distracted with the operational demands or the next “shiny ball”. Left unmanaged, this can create silos, inhibit collaboration, and flow through to product or service quality, unwanted attrition and reputational harm.
Make it a priority. Not an afterthought
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to ‘disrupt’, ‘reimagine’, and ‘reinvent’. But when culture is given the focus it deserves, and approached strategically with care and discipline, it can create huge competitive advantage. Achieving this means building a holistic picture of the impact of culture and subcultures on business outcomes.
Intentional culture-shaping initiatives, the embedding of culture in values and principles, and openly celebrating the right behaviours are key to inculcating a strong, unifying culture. Due diligence processes in M&A should also clearly reflect the importance of culture.
Leaders are the foundation of scale-up success and need open eyes and minds to succeed
For a start-up navigating its first few precarious months, the right leadership can strongly tip the odds of survival and success. This applies as much to a leader’s organisational literacy as to their ability to raise funds, communicate their proposition or take care of their customers. Poor leadership can cause instability among the team, tarnish employees’ faith in the company’s future, and harm sales, service and reputation. This can be especially common in start-ups where managers are often junior and relatively inexperienced, and eventually promoted above their level of competence as a reward for showing faith in the new venture. The issue can then be exacerbated as they make unsuitable and poorly informed hiring decisions.
In a recent survey 83% of employees in start-ups claimed that a minority or none of their bosses were properly equipped to manage. Two thirds also felt micromanaged and around half felt they had not been given clear goals, had felt bullied or harassed, and had not been given the right emotional and personal support from their managers. We’ll help you stay in the minority.
Successful leaders are active and relentless advocates of culture, encouraging its ownership throughout the organisation. By contrast, unsuccessful leaders can often become a single point of failure.
Creating the feedback loop
Good leadership must be interactive. Resolute belief and staying the course must go hand in hand with listening, empathy, flexibility and constant fine-tuning. Feedback, and the ability to ask for it and receive it openly, is vital to this. Like everyone, leaders are a work in progress. They need guidance, mentoring and fresh challenges, which must be aligned to commercial objectives. Leaders of successful scale-ups balance humility with confidence and recognise their development and the development of their team is linked to the business’ ongoing success. Enduring organisations create recognisable leadership brands alongside their customer and employee brands that allow them to attract and retain the best leaders.They also codify and regularly refresh areas of leadership capability needed to excel, adapt and minimise leadership and succession risk. This doesn’t mean a “cult-of-CEO” but a shared language of leadership excellence that helps ensure lasting out-performance and differentiation.
Organisation capabilities need to be worked on - but not every capability in an organisation can be a priority
There is no greater need for getting organisation development right than in facilitating change in a business. Successful change efforts require a deft coordination of multiple efforts including building a clear and compelling case for change, aligning the senior leadership team, assuring leadership responsibility for driving the process, involving others in design and implementation, communicating to engage, receiving accurate, timely feedback on progress, sustaining momentum and developing people to succeed through the change. Sufficient attention to the transition from the old organisation to the new one is vital.
Failing to sequence and prioritise organisation development activity resulting in wasting resources on areas and pet projects that show little return. Failing to coordinate and plan development to deliver strategy and enable change. Not being able to foster an operating rhythm and managing the inherent tension between operational excellence and innovation.
Right action, right time, right order
Design your organisation structure, roles, lateral and people processes to deliver the vision and strategy with desired culture and agility in mind - engage leaders, staff and key stakeholders in the process for understanding, consistency and quality. Do the same for any changes that are designed to change or improve the business. Prioritise and sequence organisation planning based on insight and best practice. Allocate resources where and when they are needed most using accurate and reliable data. Monitor progress and capture learning continuously.