What culture drives fast growth?

You have to have the right culture in place to drive fast growth but what does it look like?

 Culture eats strategy is a much-toted truism these days and despite that it should be as it is completely correct. While this can have an impact in large corporate cultures, or I certainly hope it can, it is much more powerful in the startup world especially when you start to grow. If you don’t have the right culture in place, you simply will not to be able to grow fast or scale up. It might be just about possible to get your start up off the ground and up and running without it but its highly unlikely and you will certainly get stuck pretty quickly or suffer almost anaemic growth. So, what is the right culture?The right culture combines many elements all inter-connected and working in conjunction with each other. It combines elements of pressure, failing fast, empowered teams, blame free outcomes, honest objective analysis and celebrations. While there are many other elements that successful cultures have and adopt I think that every successful start up that manages to grow quickly and scale has all of the above.

 Failing fast is widely regarded as key but it comes with a huge caveat. If you consistently fail then ultimately you will just fail- sounds obvious? Every start up will have failures, usually plenty as it iterates, pivots and evolves to land on product market fit. The key isn’t to just fail fast but rather to fail as little as possible but when you do to learn the lessons and move on as quickly as possible.

 Speed is your friend, but time is your enemy.  As a start up you are unencumbered by bureaucracy, established practices, existing products and all the usual barriers to fast paced trial and error so speed is your friend. However, you only have so much runway or investor cash so you need to fail quickly, learn fast and evolve so that you start gaining commercial traction before the cash clock runs out.

Put simply you can fail fast but you need to quickly evolve your way to success.

This is easy when you are just starting out but as you grow and want to scale the blame free and empowered team elements start to become key.

 As soon as startups are up and running and have a product that they can grow a weird transformation often happens. All the previous behavioural traits that helped them get up and running disappear as they implement a top-down command and control structure, with strict sign offs and QA and attempt to ‘corporatise’. This is like a toddler trying to drive a car. They are too early in your evolution to do that. This is particularly bad where the founder(s) suffers from an ego. There is no place for ego in a startup and especially one that wants to scale.

An empowered culture is one where everybody whatever their status or ranking or experience is encouraged at all times to try new things and to tinker at the edges, all without supervision or constant oversight and sign off. Innovation is not completely reinventing the wheel every time but small step by step but constant improvements. If everyone is empowered to constantly try new things and to seek marginal gains without fear of failure, then every part of the business will improve. 

This is why the blame free cultural element is so important. I don’t mean it’s fine to simply mess up and there will be no consequences.  If someone does so then they should be let go but there is a world of difference between just messing up through lack of care or effort and being exhausted from working all hours trying to help grow and you must differentiate. Importantly when people are on a vertical learning curve, trying something no-one has done before, always looking at trying to do the previously unthinkable them mistakes are a given. If you want to scale and grow fast then all of these things need to be happening constantly and everyone must be empowered to try to do them without fear of blame.

The worst that can happen is that someone tries something new and it just doesn’t work. Even if the only lesson is that it does not work then it hasn’t been a waste of time. More likely lessons will be learnt and ideas generated that will help lead to something that does work. Even better and only very occasionally it works first time. All of the above outcomes are great but they will only occur if people feel free to try without fear of blame or censure.

As you begin to grow quickly more and more mistakes happen. Communications are suddenly out of date, processes no longer work, team structures or areas of work focus no longer make sense. These will happen quickly and as you grow faster the mistakes will speed up. It is a simple fact. 

Any business that wants to grow fast has to accept this and understand that your ability to grow as business is simply correlated to how quickly you can spot mistakes and how quickly and how well you can fix them.

Exponential growth depends on this. Grow so fast you can’t spot or fix the mistakes and you’ll slow down. Ignore the mistakes and you’ll probably blow up and go under. If no mistakes are happening then you’re either not growing or deluding yourself with potentially dire consequences.

In order for this to work and for you to move from startup to scale up you need to retain the culture of failing fast but only when tinkering at the edges, make sure everyone is empowered to constantly try new things without needing sign off or business plans, ensuring that it is blame free and there is no censure for tyring to improve the business with marginal gains and finally ensuring that your business is set up both instantly spot mistakes and to fix them was quickly and as well as possible. Sounds easy right?

 If you can do all this then there is a good chance you will start to grow quickly but in order to solidify and maintain that growth you now need to bring into the culture the elements of pressure, objectivity and celebration – next week’s topic 😊