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.

  If you haven't been to my blog before you might want to subscribe to my feed

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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