The High Growth Challenge: Are You Winning on the Cultural Battleground?

Every business has a cultural battleground, for most the battle is little more than a skirmish. Even that, for many businesses, is something they struggle to win. For High Growth Businesses, winning on the cultural battleground is vital to their survival.

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Are You Winning on the Cultural Battleground? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The first question you're probably asking is "where is the cultural battleground?". The answer is anywhere a new recruit comes into contact with your company. So in a small start up it is most likely to be the founders of the business. For a larger company it would most likely be their direct reports and for a business that is bigger still it will be the next level down. In general, it tends to be at the lowest levels of the company hierarchy where most interactions take place.  The cultural battleground is where new recruits come up against your company culture and will try to add their own influence the intensity  of the skirmish will be based on their own history and closeness to your business's culture. The further away the recruits culture from yours the more intense the skirmish.

For the business, winning on this battleground is vital, after all if it cannot integrate new staff into its existing culture readily, then individual skirmishes will persist and the existing staff will become battle weary and be even less effective in protecting your culture. More importantly for a High Growth Business, at some point this new recruit will become the company's face for other new recruits, who will want to push their own cultural norms. It is easy to see on this basis, how quickly a company's culture can be undermined and changed. Very often this can happen without the senior management being aware of the issue. It will only become apparent as they see employees become less committed not only to the company's values but also those processes put in place to make sure the culture remains embedded in the business.

So far we have only looked at this issue on an individual basis, now let's imagine the problem from the aspect of numbers. For example, over the next 18 months you expect to grow from 32 to 44 people. That assumes a growth rate of a little over 20% per annum. It involves taking on 12 people at a rate of 1 person every 6 weeks over 18 months. 

This strategy carries a risk to your current culture and customer experience; unless you can convert your new recruits to buy into your culture quickly enough, to prevent them from being polluted by other new recruits.  So in this case time is of the essence. Using our previous example, if it takes you 18 months to integrate a new recruit, you'll have a business with potentially up to 12 heretics in a group of 44 as none will have yet been integrated.  Under those circumstances it would be almost impossible to preserve your cultural values and you'd certainly lose the cultural battle. However, if you can integrate your new recruits in say 6 months then you'll only have 4 heretics in a group of 44, that's a much more manageable number.  Better still with the short integration time certainly 1 and possibly 2 of those five will be very close to integration giving you a great chance of winning on the cultural battleground.

As a High Growth Business it may be that you will be taking on new people about every month for the foreseeable future. Then this becomes a real concerted and incessant battle. No doubt your success has in part been achieved by the application of your cultural values and you’ll want to protect them to ensure your continued success, then winning on this battleground is a matter of survival. In which case to support your side you need to provide your “troops” with the best equipment. That will include:

1) A clear and strong recruitment process that seeks to take on only the best talent with the best cultural fit.

2) A comprehensive operations document which describes in detail “the way we do things here” and is what I call "The Big Colouring Book" of your business.

3) A well thought out and considered statement on your cultural values. Or what might be described as “why we do things the way we do things here”.

4) An induction and integration process which enables new recruits to understand “the why” thereby making it easier to accept “the how”.

The better prepared and supported your troops the more new recruits you can manage. If you get this right you can cope with almost any number of new recruits. I can give you two examples based on my own experience:

1) A company with a planned growth of 7 new starters per month for a year with a starting number of 120.

2) A subsidiary which, on the back of a big contact win, grew from 28 to 81 staff in a little over 10 months. 

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Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for Managing High Growth, 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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How a Strong Culture Improves Your ROI with New Recruits

How Strong Is Your Business Culture?

Over the last couple of weeks I've had a number of discussions about how to integrate new people into a business, or "onboarding" as the Americans term it.  Where discussions got interesting was how a business’s culture or lack of it, influenced the speed with which new staff became integrated.

So how does culture influence post recruitment integration and what else if anything will have an impact? My experience with high performing businesses has confirmed the importance of culture in the process. The reason for this is that taking on new staff can be seen as the key battleground between the existing culture of the business and the culture of the new hire. The stronger the business culture then the more influence it will have and either the new hire will integrate quickly or leave.  Those with a strong culture will quickly show new starters that they will not be able to change or modify the culture. This can be seen most obviously in the military where new recruits have no input at all and must submit completely to the prevailing culture.

Those, however, with a weaker cultural tradition will have greater difficulties in getting new hires to conform, resulting in increased costs of integration and greater disruption to the business as new hires continue to argue their corner.  This is because those businesses with a weaker cultural tradition will have greater difficulty in persuading a new hire to conform to the way they do things, mainly because they don’t have clear processes or a strong philosophical underpinning as to why things are done in a particular way. Faced with inconsistencies and often contradictory assertions of the recruiting business a new hire with a strong personality may be able to readily persuade existing staff members that they have a better way. This state of affairs can easily upset existing settled staff who were happily doing things the “old way”.

Nevertheless, culture on its own will not do the job, although it helps by clarifying your approach. Just as important, however, is having a good description of not only "why we do the things this way" but also "how we do things here". I describe it as the big colouring book for your business. You might call it an operations manual or a knowledge bank. Whatever you call it having a written process is infinitely better than a verbal explanation.

There are two key reasons for this, first people tend to argue less if something is written down. It gives the words a level of gravitas that is seldom achieved with the spoken word. Second, is it allows the new staff member to try things out without the same high level of reliance on, interaction with, and consequent disruption of existing staff when you are reliant on verbal communication.

  

If, therefore, you are embarking on, or are indeed in, a period of high growth the strength of your cultural values and your ability to create a written operational manual will be significant factors in integration of new people and therefore your ability to maintain your growth.

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Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for Managing High Growth, 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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Finding Your Vision? Why Is It So Difficult?

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I was doing some research for a book I am writing, part of which is about the importance of having a vision. What has become clear, especially in the UK, is how little understanding there is about this topic. This was brought more into focus whilst watching the documentary series "The Men Who Built America", what made them stand out was not only the strength of their Vision but the fact that they had one at all.

My experience in the UK with owner businessmen, is that it is quite challenging getting them to understand how important having a vision is to the long term prosperity of their business. When I give training courses about leadership of high growth businesses, the section on Vision is one of the most challenging. This is because I can count on the fingers of one hand how many business owners actually have thought out what their vision is, whilst the majority just dismiss it as some sort of consultant "mumbo jumbo".  They simply don't get it.

English: DOE Departemental Enterprise Vision (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I wonder if it’s something about the British and their cynicism that prevents them from grasping the value of understanding the purpose of their business. I don't mean from a personal perspective ie to make money, retire in 5 years, those statements are just measurements. I mean having a real business Vision:  something that describes what it is about the way you do what you do, that will have customers flocking to buy your product or service. To paraphrase a comment about George Bush senior and his struggles with the vision thing "If you don't know where you want to go why would you expect others to put themselves out to help you get there?"

That’s essentially the simple great benefit of having a vision. It is something that you can use to bind your employees and your customers to you as they will see, understand and share your Vision and as a result will want to continue to be your customers or employees, to help you get there.

Most of us haven’t found that vision or purpose and so it is much easier to find a substitute and embrace someone else’s, rather than to try to uncover your own. By finding your vision you become one of the few and really separate yourself from your competition. Once found, it immediately makes decisions easier by simply asking does doing this move me towards my vision? You will instantly discard those actions to which the answer is “No”, allowing you to concentrate on those things that will. This immediately makes your business more effective, as you have a clear simple process on which to test effort and separate yourself from those who don’t know where they are going, so, do everything “just in case”

Let’s be honest, uncovering your vision is difficult and getting it down to a succinct phrase takes a lot of effort. Do you really think that the famous Disney vision "to make people happy" came together in a blinding flash? It was developed and honed over time to something that encapsulated the Vision in a simple sound bite. 

Just because we don't generally think at this level or in these terms doesn't mean we can’t if we don't put our minds to it. The first stage is to just put something down and work on it over time until you think it reflects your purpose.

Here are some examples of small business visions, but not small, business visions. I asked the members of the LinkedIn group that I run “managing high growth” if they had a vision and if so what it was. These were the results. I think these examples are more relevant than those famous Visions of the large corporates.

In case you’re asking mine is "To enable high growth businesses to grow faster for longer and with less stress" Others are “To help clients increase sales and reduce time and cost” and “To create an environment where people feel valued”

So uncover your vision and get yourself clarity in your business, separate yourself from your competition and start being more successful. If you think you'd like some more help in extracting your vision contact me here

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for Managing High Growth, 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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Managing High Growth: Using Your Culture for Competitive Advantage

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In my earlier piece about the importance of culture in high growth businesses I talked about how culture is considered a soft skill and that most business people tend to ignore it, mostly because there is no imm

Aleutian Cultures (Photo credit: Travis S.)

ediate quantifiable benefit and of course because it involves dealing with people. That's for HR people isn't it?

What I wanted to share in this post was the idea that culture can be a potent weapon by giving you an important competitive advantage. If implemented and understood it can help significantly in promoting a company's growth. Your culture establishes how your company and its staff interact with one another and with the outside world (your customers and prospects). It reflects your core values and your ethics.

So how is this a competitive weapon? Well lets look at two areas where High Growth Businesses experience problems. Finding and keeping the right staff and dealing with new problems. 

All high growth businesses face many challenges which are outside the experience of the owners or the senior staff. There is naturally a high degree of risk involved in making decisions in this environment. However as a business owner you don't want to be the only person who makes these decisions and by getting your staff to face these issues it in turn develops their skills. In order for your staff to be confident about making these decisions you must have the right culture in place. That is firstly to allow them to make decisions and not be afraid of making mistakes; and secondly a culture which support risk management so decision making can be shared across the management team and moves away from blaming individuals. Having the kind of culture which supports this kind of decision making will give you a real competitive advantage.

The other area is the strength of your culture. One of the major growth inhibitors is not getting enough of the right kind of people together with the time taken to integrate them  into your business to become fully productive. Having a strong culture creates what I have termed a cultural wall it works like this.

A company'as cultural wall uses a strong culture to ensure that only those potential employees who align with your culture will stay with the company. Those who are not fully committed or are trying to change it will bounce off the wall. That is either deliberately not join or leave soon after joining. Those who align with your culture will cross the wall and feel protected. This affinity leads to significantly lower attrition and a quicker absorption of new staff bringing them up to full productivity quicker, not to mention the increased likelihood of staff putting in more effort and extra hours into something to which they feel fully committed. 

By contrast those organisations with a weak or poorly developed culture suffer from inherently higher attrition as left unchecked people develop pockets of competing cultures, which results in a generally high level of attrition, and an increased chance that new employees will take longer to get up to speed. 

It should be obvious from the above how important Culture is to a business, the quicker companies get to grips with this the better their chance of longer term high growth.

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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I’m Sorry; But I’m Too Rich to Come into Work Today.

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Image via Wikipedia

Success produces some unusual problems for a business. I was reminded of such when I read recent article in Business Insider that the proposed Facebook IPO will create over 1000 millionaires. This article goes on to give examples of some of the more exc

essive plans of these potential millionaires. The big question for Facebook, is how many of them will want to go back to their mundane jobs with such a big bank account balance.

There is no doubt that a fair percentage of them will at least for the short term continue with their day jobs, but as the realisation about what their wealth can do for them you can expect to see an increasing number having days off because they are just too rich. 

 The immediate problem for Facebook is that there are just so many of them. Can you imagine the problem facing Facebook if they all left at once, the loss of intellectual as well as cultural capital would be enormous. The difficulty for Facebook is that the normal rules of engagement don’t apply. Withholding pay, gets the so what response, as does any disciplinary procedure even being sacked would hold little fear. In a curious way Facebook are in a similar position to the banks and loan defaults; that is there comes a point when the large numbers of potential leavers (defaulters) becomes more of a problem in itself than putting sanctions against individuals. 

This by no means a unique problem although it is rare, Microsoft faced a similar situation when they went public for the first time in 1986. There were faced with a large number of employees becoming millionaires and recognised the risks to the organisation. There is no silver bullet solution for this type of scenario as it is rarely faced by any business. From the scraps of information I have been able to assemble it seems that Microsoft tried to focus on staff attitudes and attempts to promote the non financial reasons why people go to work as a way of minimising the potential impact of such significant staff attrition. 

They sought to identify reasons why very wealthy people would continue to come into work particularly if their jobs were relative low level. Senior Managers tend to be very driven and are often financially secure to a windfall would make a difference but not a significant one, for the most part. 

Image via CrunchBase

Technical staff were a different problem in that typically they are not motivated by money but the size of the windfall may disprove those assumptions. It seems that by offering ore technically challenging roles would go some way towards addressing the issue for this type of individual although equally you ant give them all more technically challenging rolls. 

The biggest batch of potential leavers is this in administrative jobs where a million dollars is a mind boggling sum of money. This group is the most difficult to deal with, so spending some 

time helping staff to prepare for the impending event will go some way towards exorcising the euphoria before the event. 

Microsoft managed reasonably well in coping with this problem but things have changed a little since the 1980’s and we are a much more materialistic in our outlook so the problem could be much worse for Mark Zuckerberg and friends.

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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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.

Image via Wikipedia

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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