Your company is primed for real growth. Will your values and culture survive?

Your company is suddenly on the verge of dramatic growth. The culture that got you here won’t automatically survive scale. If you don’t define and protect it before the ramp, everything you’ve built can go sideways in an instant.

If you don’t know your culture, you won’t find your direction, know who to hire, or scale with velocity while staying true to your core. You have one shot to get it right.

Here are the steps to identify and safeguard your company’s culture, then harness it for moments of rapid growth.

What does company culture mean anyway?

Let’s start by identifying what culture isn’t. Culture isn’t your ping-pong or foosball table, kombucha on tap, and beer thirty. Those are artifacts of your company’s culture.

If teamwork and camaraderie are explicit in your company’s culture, then things like game rooms, book clubs, and Tuesday poker tournaments are manifestations of your culture. But more often than not, these amenities and activities have no backing. They’re not the manifestation of anything—especially not a core culture.

We often see these hollow manifestations in startup environments. They’re feel-good features to demonstrate good office vibes or make a workplace more desirable to new hires. The result: nobody actually goes to poker night. The values that would make people want to come don’t really exist.

In reality, culture is shaped by behavior. What is OK and what isn’t. What gets you ahead and what gets you fired. What is celebrated, what is tolerated, what is forbidden.

Where should company culture originate?

Culture should bubble up organically, right? Isn’t that how real, authentic cultures are created? Wouldn’t a command-and-control, led-by-the-top culture be fake, inauthentic, and weird?

Nope. Real culture is strategic without being artificial. It’s actually more real when behaviors align with leadership expectations. That’s what makes it authentic and strategic. For high-performance companies, culture starts at the top, never the bottom. Culture is vision-oriented, and it has to be established, refined, and reinforced by your CEO.

A company culture is born of what is most critical to a founder/CEO/owner. The values they see as essential are reflected and reiterated through the hiring of C-suite and senior management.

A great culture is both architected and very real. It starts with identifying your company’s values. Let’s look at how.

A framework for prioritizing values 

Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Advantage, puts values into a spectrum of categories that helps you understand how each contributes to a company’s culture. Here’s how we look at the spectrum and how you can begin to prioritize yours.

Table stakes values

Like the minimum amount you need to pony up at a poker table, this is a small buy-in just to get a seat to play. These are the behaviors expected at 99 percent of all businesses.

Table stakes values aren’t particularly illuminating, helpful, or strategic. And they’re clogging up the value statements of way too many companies. Common examples: integrity, honesty, customer service, and innovation.

Great. We get it. But all of those things are understood and expected. Can you honestly think of one company that doesn’t value integrity, honesty, customer service, or innovation? Exactly. It’s fine to celebrate and embody qualities like these, but including them in your value statement is unnecessary and not strategic.

Core values

Your core values are the most important, unique, and fundamental to your business. They are central to the way your CEO/founder thinks and operates. They’re inherent in their actions and ambitions.

Assuming they are defined correctly in the first place, core values are unchanging and should endure as long as the same CEO/ownership is in place. They’re not aspirational; they’re real and evident to everyone. Here’s a quick litmus test:

Which behaviors are ownership or leadership willing to lose money on? What are the non-negotiable, ride-or-die things you expect in all employees, and even in your clients? The attributes you identify are probably strong candidates for core values.

Your list of core values should be short. Three is ideal. Four is max. Any list longer than that means you won’t really be able to enforce any of them. You also risk values that contradict or compete with each other.

Coming up with a list of five, eight, or twelve values is easy. Getting to three is the challenge. It requires rigor, debate, and discipline.

Accidental values 

So-called accidental values (or sometimes legacy values) are usually behaviors that have been done for a long time but aren’t strategic, and may even be harmful to how your company functions today. They’ve become the norm and won’t serve you well in growth mode.

Values don’t always mean positive. Accidental values can be benign—but still damaging. Examples: nepotism, a pattern of hiring homogeneous engineering teams, allowing hurtful or offensive humor.

Accidental values will stifle your company when it’s time to scale. Identify yours and address them before they sink the ramp-up.

Aspirational values

These are behaviors you don’t exhibit naturally, but want to embed in your business. They take effort and diligence.

Aspirational values are often a response to your accidental values. For example, you might include diversity as an aspirational value because you lack diversity in leadership. Aspirational values are an honest way to name what you want to be true—even if it isn’t yet.

Embed your values in your company’s culture and act on them

As you’re getting ready to grow, your values need to become the cornerstone of your culture. They must be documented, ultra clear, and accessible to everyone. Posters may feel corny, but they can be effective.

Leadership must over-communicate. Most things need to be heard at least ten times before they take hold. Then define and modify your business practices and processes to align with your core and aspirational values.

Your hiring should also align with your core values. Develop tools and tests to identify which applicants share them. It’s better to have a great core-values hire with fewer skills than a highly-skilled hire who doesn’t share the values that hold your company together.

Use your culture as a launch pad

As you gear up for growth, identifying, codifying, and communicating your core values is critical to keeping your company’s culture intact no matter how big you get.

If you’re approaching real growth and your culture isn’t yet codified, that’s the work. Talk to us.