There’s nothing quite like stepping back and seeing that your business is growing, seeing that your hard work and dedication is paying off. But, even with the most strategic scaling operation and well thought out plans, there are a few things at risk, such as company culture. Keeping your culture intact is one of the hardest challenges of scaling and though it’s possible, it’s not guaranteed. It’s one of the most important things to think about as your business grows, and you’ll only be able to scale without sacrificing culture if you follow in the footsteps of fast-growing businesses that have paved the way before you.
Company Culture and Its Importance
When the time comes to scale your team, you need to be mindful of company culture. But, what exactly does company culture mean? When we talk about culture within a business, we’re talking about the values, behaviours and rituals that everyone working within the team shares. It’s all about the way people treat one another, how decisions are made and how challenges are dealt with. It shapes how employees show up, collaborate and feel about their work, and it has a huge impact on whether or not a workplace is a supportive, welcoming place to be.
Culture isn’t something that’s written in your brand guidelines or included in your onboarding documents. It’s found in how your managers give feedback, how conflicts are handled and how wins are celebrated, even how mistakes are dealt with. In fact, company culture is so important, it can be the thing that sways a candidate into choosing one job over another.
Though you can certainly improve company culture, you can’t create it from scratch. It forms early, often unconsciously, and it’s driven by the day-to-day running of the business. But, as businesses grow, company culture can shift. This isn’t always for the better, which is why team scaling needs to be done with culture preservation in mind. You don’t want to lose a great company culture, simply because of a scaling team.
Why Culture Can Shift During Team Scaling
- When you hire a lot of new people, the original culture of the company can change. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but there’s no guarantee that things will stay the same. When you’re onboarding new people, each of them brings something new to the table. You need to make sure that everyone embodies the values that the business started with, as this makes sure they align with the existing team.
- A lot of time and energy goes into scaling a team, which means that business owners, founders and leaders become less accessible. With more people to manage and a larger workload to delegate, there’s less time to be hands-on with staff. The leadership presence that helped to create the early culture becomes stretched thin, which can cause things to change.
- When you’re scaling a team, you’re likely going to need more systems to help with collaboration, project and team management. Whereas things likely started out informally – for example, informal team collaboration sessions and quick informal messages, rather than professional emails – team scaling often leads to systems being formalised. This can make the culture more rigid.
- Scaling is often done on a time limit. You might have a big project coming up that you need more help with, or clients are flowing through the door and you don’t want to turn them away. This means that speed is often prioritised, with culture and team alignment being forgotten about. In the rush to build, launch and sell, company culture often becomes an afterthought.
Despite how easily culture can shift during team scaling, it’s not something to overlook. It can lead to disengagement, miscommunication, teams on different pages, internal politics and a higher turnover of staff. Thankfully, culture can scale alongside your team, evolving for the better. Many of the UK’s fastest-growing businesses have found ways to preserve, and even strengthen, their culture during periods of scaling.
How to Scale Without Sacrificing Team Culture
- Document Your Values and Culture – When you first start a business, a lot of the culture is intuitive, it happens on its own. There’s no need to write it down, as everyone knows how things are done. But, with a scaling team, it’s harder for people to make assumptions and intuitively know what the culture is. This is why it’s important to write down your core values, describe how you make decisions and treat customers, and create a ‘how to’ culture guide.
- Ensure New Hires Add to the Culture – Instead of simply hiring someone based on whether or not they will fit in well with the company culture, hire someone based on what they can add to the culture. Look for people who align with your values, but also bring something new to the business. As you scale your team, include value-based interview questions in your hiring process and avoid rushing hires, as one wrong hire can set the tone for an entire department.
- Make Leaders Cultural Guides – In a small business, leaders play a big part in guiding company culture. This is something the UK’s fastest-growing businesses prioritise as they scale. Managers shape the daily employee experience, for better or worse, which is why developing leadership needs to be a focal point. Invest in leadership that provides emotional intelligence, inclusive management, giving and receiving feedback, and reinforcing values in practice
- Align Your Systems with Values – Everything needs to reflect your company culture, including your systems and processes. If you say you value transparency and openness, make sure performance data and decision-making is an open, shared experience. If you say you value innovation, give your team time to innovate and let them know it’s encouraged, even if failure is a risk. If you promote collaboration between teams, don’t encourage individual performance.
Leadership is at the Heart of Company Culture
At the heart of company culture is leadership, and having the right leadership and structure can protect it, even as a business scales. The fastest-growing businesses don’t just scale revenue or headcount, they scale clarity, alignment and purpose across the entire team, all of which is led by strong, structured leaders. Culture isn’t about snappy slogans and cheering on your team, it’s about the behaviours that leaders model, the decisions they make and the standards they set. If leadership is inconsistent and poorly structured, a strong, positive culture fails to take hold. When leaders lead with intention, culture continues to flourish, even amidst scaling.
Use Company Culture to Your Advantage
The journey from startup to scaleup is exciting, but it’s unlikely to happen without a little bit of friction here and then. In the race to grow faster, it’s tempting to treat culture as something that can be revisited at a later date, assuming it’s not a priority. But, if you want to build a business that lasts – a business that attracts the right people, successfully adapts to change and delivers – culture can’t be postponed. It’s not something to overlook, forget about or leave until the last minute. When you’re scaling a team, culture needs to be at the forefront of everything you do.
Scaling without sacrificing culture isn’t even, and even the most successful businesses struggle. But, by learning from those who’ve done it well – those who have continued to grow quickly during periods of growth, committing to clarity, leadership and consistency – it’s entirely possible to scale your business without losing what made you special in the first place.
Growth and culture are not opposites and they don’t need to work against each other. They’re partners, they go hand in hand. At Profici, we understand that successful scaling starts with the right leadership. We help businesses collaborate with leaders who don’t just drive results, they protect culture along the way. Get in touch to find out more.
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