I sometimes joke that much of the work I do with growing companies falls into one of two categories: PREPARE or REPAIR. But there's a lot of truth in it.
When I come into a company relatively early, I get to help them PREPARE for growth. We look at the culture that got them to where they are. What should they protect? What might become an obstacle as they grow? What kind of leadership will they need? What behaviours and ways of working need to evolve?
When I come in later, however, I'm more often helping them REPAIR some of what happened along the way.
When growth starts to hurt
It doesn't necessarily mean that things have gone terribly wrong. Quite often, the company has been very successful. They've grown fast, hired great people, built new teams, introduced new layers of leadership, perhaps entered new markets.
But then they start noticing things.
Priorities aren't as clear as they used to be. Silos emerge. Decisions take longer. Collaboration gets harder. There may be more tension between teams, less room for innovation, perhaps even good people deciding to leave.
None of these things is unusual. But left unattended, they have a habit of becoming something bigger. Because growth has an interesting habit: it magnifies what doesn't work.
A little ambiguity when you're 23 people can become a lot of confusion when you're 100. A founder being involved in most decisions can feel efficient when everyone fits around one table and become a bottleneck when there are eight teams. And behaviour you might overlook in a high-performing employee can suddenly become part of your culture when they start managing others.
We prepare the business. But what about the organisation?
Companies prepare for growth in almost every other area. Financing. Technology. Products. Systems. Sales capacity. Markets. Strategy.
But how often do we ask: Are we preparing the organisation for growth too?
A recent BCG study made me think about this again. BCG surveyed 563 senior leaders across 11 markets and found that 63% said the senior leaders in their organisations were not well prepared for what long-term success will require.
63%. That's quite a number.
Interestingly, most leaders actually know what good leadership looks like. The challenge seems to be doing it – consistently.
BCG calls this the "belief gap." Their research looked at three things that help leadership teams adapt:
reframing the beliefs they operate from
practising new behaviours
making those behaviours part of how the organisation actually works
Only 15% consistently did all three. And of the three, reframing beliefs seems particularly powerful: BCG found that leaders who did this were 168% more likely to outperform their competitors.
Culture lives on a busy Tuesday morning
Most organisations already know what they want their culture to be.
Trust. Collaboration. Accountability. Learning. Innovation. Empathy. Clarity.
You can probably find many of those words on company walls and websites all over the world.
I'm, however, much more interested in what happens on a busy Tuesday morning when a deadline is slipping, a customer is unhappy and everyone is under pressure.
That's where culture lives.
BCG talks about the difference between stated values and working assumptions, which I think is a useful way of looking at it. A company may say learning matters, but still see time spent learning as time away from "real work". Collaboration may be a company value, but the people who get rewarded are the individual heroes. Empathy may be important, until results are under pressure.
When that happens often enough, you don't really need to ask which one becomes the culture.
Culture isn't created by our intentions. It's created by our consistent behaviours.
And growth puts all of this under pressure. You're taking habits and ways of working that developed in one kind of organisation and asking them to work in a much bigger and more complex one. What worked beautifully when you were 30 people may be precisely what gets in your way when you're 100 – or 300.
Is the culture that got us HERE capable of taking us NEXT?
I wouldn't be asking whether your culture is good or bad. Culture isn't something you pass or fail.
Instead I'd ask whether the culture you have today supports the organisation you're trying to become tomorrow.
And you certainly don't need a 12-month culture transformation to start finding out.
I would start with three questions:
PROTECT – What is working today that we absolutely don't want to lose?
Maybe it's how quickly people make decisions. How close everyone still feels to the customer. The willingness to jump in and help each other. The entrepreneurial energy that got the company this far.
Growth doesn't have to mean losing those things. But it helps to know what you want to hold on to.
SHIFT – What works today but may not work tomorrow?
Maybe decisions still depend too heavily on the founders. Information lives in people's heads. Managers are still behaving like individual contributors. Teams work brilliantly on their own but less brilliantly together.
Sometimes these are simply signs that the organisation has outgrown some of its old ways of working.
BUILD – What will we need that we don't have yet?
Maybe managers need to become more comfortable making decisions without the founders. Teams may need to collaborate differently across functions. Leaders may need to communicate more clearly as the organisation becomes more complex.
Where will you need more clarity, trust or accountability? What behaviours will you need more of as the organisation grows?
You're looking at where you are today and getting ready for where you're going next.
So...
Preparing doesn't mean predicting every problem you're going to have. You can't. Growth is messy. People are complicated. Markets change. Strategies change. Leaders make mistakes.
It simply means making sure your organisation is better equipped to handle whatever comes next.
To PREPARE, or to REPAIR? That, dear leaders, is the question.
