Managing a High Growth Business: Its the Culture, Stupid!

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Culture is one of the most under rated aspects influencing a business. Get it right and you can support and promote cooperation to support and reinforce success. Get it wrong and you can say goodbye to a successful business and say hello to a world of hurt.

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BRITISH POET AND CRITIC MATTHEW ARNOLD
VIEWED "CULTURE" AS THE CULTIVATION
 OF THE HUMANIST IDEAL.

Every business has a culture whether you know it or not, whether you've consciously tried to set one or not.  Culture is set the day you start a business as it is a reflection of you, the owner, your values and personality. So if you like playing politics, politics will become an integral part of the business. Your values on customer service, sales, staff management in fact everything you do in business both internally and externally is influenced, if not dictated, by your culture.

Given its importance why is Culture not higher up on the list of things to explore when building a business.  In fact it’s often completely overlooked. The reason for this I would suggest is that the critical impact that Culture has on a business is not well understood. It is often completely overlooked by advisers and start ups alike, under the misguided impression that culture is something for a big business to consider. This totally ignores the fact that having the wrong culture is likely to prevent you from getting to a big company in the first place.    It is also because Culture is one of those soft touchy feely issues that tend to be avoided by by business people and is shunned by an ever more materialistic society. This is not intended to be a commentary on the importance of culture in our society but rather impact ignorance as an owner of what your business culture is and what it should be.

Taking this analysis further; incompatible cultures, or rather a lack of interest by the sellers of business and ignorance of the importance by buyers is the number 1 reason why so many acquisitions fail or at least fail to deliver a significant portion of the expected benefits. More worryingly ignorance of the importance of culture is the most common reason why the cost of integration is substantially more than projected.

How do you identify your culture?

This is a two step process. Firstly identify what you would like your culture to be then secondly ask your staff what they think it is. In order to make it easier for your staff to explain what they think is the company culture, distil the description of your culture into a few words. So for example; customer service, quality and price. Also recognise that the order of the words indicates their importance. For example a business with the keyword priority customer service, quality and price will have a significantly different culture to a business whose keyword priority is price, quality and customer service. Try it, you’ll find the answer illuminating.

If the culture is not what we want, how do we change it?

Changes in culture are notoriously difficult to implement because we are trying to change people’s attitudes. Change starts with you, as in all probability, you created the original by your actions or the appearance of your actions.

Step 1 clearly define what you want your culture to be in as much detail as possible, explain your rationale, then go on to describe how you will expect your management and staff to act. Then you follow a long process of reinforcing the culture across the business, but how you do this is the subject of a future article.

Related articles

• The success of Oracle's acquisition of RightNow will reside in the details (forbes.com)
• Culture or business? (rolanfest.wordpress.com)

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business , Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business.  

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Taking Your Business to the Gym – Resolving Decision Overload

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Decision overload condition, as I have described in an earlier article Recognising Decision Overload is simply where the business owner becomes so swamped by the amount of decisions and tasks he has to complete that it stops the business in its tracks.  This condition is often created by the business owner inadvertently training their staff that w

hen they come up against a problem, their best and/or safest course of action is not to make a decision, but, refer it to the business owner.

Having created, albeit unknowingly, this vicious circle the question is how do we create a virtuous circle?

The first step is to understand why business owners end up there in the first place. Often it’s because of the business owners lack of understanding that he shouldn’t attempt provide solutions for every problem, and second decision making should be “Fit for Purpose” and should not involve “gold plating the bathroom taps”. That is, don’t use a £100,000 a year man to make decisions on issues that can easily be made by a person paid £20,000 a year.

So how can this be achieved? The first step is to stop enforcing the vicious circle. Allow staff to make decisions. So when a member of staff says “I’ve got this problem; what do I do?” don’t rush to tell them but respond with “what do you think you should do?” Initially this will be met by a blank stare or even a look of amazement, but, fear not, this is the most important step. You could follow this up with  “why don’t you go away and think about it for a bit and come back with some ideas and we can talk about which one is best”

Initially it is going to make things a little harder and slow down overall decision making but it is critical to allowing you to work your way out of a job and to allow your staff to fill it. Once over the initial shock you’ll be surprised how quickly some of your staff will learn to take decisions. This is a difficult area for many business owners as firstly; they are uncomfortable delegators and secondly; are perfectionists (often confused with control freaks, although they can be that too) and expect that staff will make all the same decisions as they would. This won’t happen they will make more mistakes than you the owner; they may not be quite as good decisions but the additional time gained by the business owner in delegating these decisions will more than make up for these additional interventions.

Image by West Virginia Blue via FlickrThis simple act of delegation and management can be enormously liberating. I can quote a number of occasions where just applying this process has transformed the performance of small businesses. It has freed the owner from almost unbearable stress and allowed him to concentrate on issues more deserving of his attention and transformed employee from mere jobsworths’ to committed and hugely valuable assets.

Exigent Consulting specialises in providing Business Turnaround, Sales, Marketing and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business.