The Hidden Culture Risks Of Rapid Growth And How Leaders Can Counter Them

Rapid growth — of a team, department, or company — is often coupled with an underestimation of the cultural implications. Consider a startup, with culture powered almost absolutely by the leaders’ narratives and actions. This culture is not sustainable as the company grows, the power fractures, and the workforce encounters new experiences unrelated to leaders’ prior narratives and actions. In other words, the culture playbook no longer has the answers on how to behave. As I shared just this week in a discussion about facing this exact situation, to preserve culture energy and, even better, to empower people to grow culture energy through this kind of growth, leaders should adopt three intentions:

Hard-code democracy. Smaller teams inherently make it easier for an individual contributor to speak up. As you scale, those voices can feel like mere responses on a survey. No matter how large your organization is, there should be a mechanism for employees to feel like voting citizens. This comes to life in open dialogue, ownership, and cocreation, and these practices must be established as norms and rituals. See our latest research (behind the paywall) on the opportunities that deep listening provides, especially when surveys aren’t keeping up.
Put humans over metrics. As organizations grow, they often succumb to “metrics obsession,” defining success narrowly by numbers and cascading pressure to meet those metrics. But metrics are signals, not stories, and overindexing on numbers will cost you, taking attention away from the “How?” and “Why?” questions related to achieving your purpose and performance goals. For a good discussion on this, listen to a recent CX Cast conversation on the phenomenon of metrics obsession, why it happens, its symptoms, and how leaders can move from dysfunctional measurement practices to a culture of measurement mastery.
Keep your managers happy. Managers are squeezed between top-down demands and bottom-up team needs, which is true in any organization. But with rapid growth, leaders often believe they only have limited resources to support managers; after all, they’re in bootstrap mode. But this is shortsighted. Sit down with managers to understand their needs; it won’t be as bad as you fear. In that conversation, be on the lookout for opportunities to give them permission to say no in an environment where everybody feels like they have to say yes to every new idea in rapid-growth mode. Managers who know when to say no can empower their teams to do the same, and with the right coaching, the work that should actually be prioritized is done with more focus and greater likelihood of success. See our data (paywalled) on how managers who coach their employees drive high engagement. Coachlike managers scale work instead of drowning in micromanaging or putting out fires.

Harder than it sounds? Fair enough! But my colleagues and I on the future-of-work team are here to help you set your intentions as you scale and define the meaningful work to translate those intentions into culture energy.