Team: Startups, Org Design And Culture
Periodic Revisions And A Constant Evolution are important to success. At high-growth #startups, a small team of individuals can morph into a complex organisation with multiple teams in a short span of time, so how can you build and maintain a strong and healthy work culture throughout growth? Learn more in this Forbes article by Kartik Mandaville: https://rb.gy/xnf9j0 #workplace #leadership
As Organisations Scale, Culture Evolves
As a society, we are conditioned into believing that culture is something that is meant to be preserved. And it is not difficult to see why. From a social lens, culture appears to be a source of identity that is inherited from previous generations, largely kept intact and then passed onto future generations.
However, from an organizational lens, culture appears to be a collective way of doing things. And things can always be done in a better way. Consider the following quote from Ben Thompson in his publication Stratechery: “All companies start with the espoused beliefs and values of their founder(s), but until those beliefs and values are proven correct and successful they are open to debate and change.”
Early on, beliefs and values need to be tested repeatedly and revised frequently. A successful organizational culture is one that evolves with time.
A Startup’s Culture Impacts Its Organizational Design, And Vice Versa
Culture is a component of organizational design. At high-growth startups, a small team of individuals can morph into a complex organization with multiple teams in a short span of time. In most cases, a nascent culture begins to form even before the startup can adopt a formal structure and design.
But even the most salient cultures need legs to stand on. If the eventual organizational design incentivizes behaviors that have led to successful outcomes in the past, it reinforces cultural values that are worthy of being carried forward. Once institutionalized, the same cultural values equip the leadership team with a frame of reference to further strengthen the organizational design.
Heterogeneous Cultures Are Healthy
In the landmark book Organizational Culture and Leadership, Edgar Schein wrote that culture is to a group what personality is to an individual.
Within the organization, culture is not one monolithic entity. It is fairly common for teams in some startups to have a distinct microculture. After all, members of a team spend a lot of time with each other, and in group settings, culture permeates through social interactions. This is not to say that teams that have a microculture are insular. More likely, the team is just highly cohesive and team members are deeply influenced by the personality, beliefs and values of their leader. If the senior leadership finds merit in introducing the microculture to the wider organization, they can rotate a volunteer member of the team across the organization as a culture champion.
Cultural elements can be imported as well. Sometimes, organizations bring in bona fide leaders from the outside just to improve culture. Experienced hires also bring a cultural trail from their previous affiliations — if channeled appropriately, their experience can be used to create a performance-oriented culture in their respective teams.
Being Intentional About Organizational Culture
The Covid-19 pandemic has expanded the human capacity for adaptation like few other global events in history. By now, employees have been away from their offices, their teams and their managers for an extended period of time. In many cases, new hires have completed a year without ever having met their colleagues in person. If there was ever a time to be intentional about designing a worthy organizational culture, this is it.
As the adage goes, every company has a culture — the only question is whether or not you decide what it is. Some elements of culture can be designed and others cannot. Among the ones that can be designed, a few have become especially important in the aftermath of Covid-19 — transparent and asynchronous communication, an emphasis on physical and mental well-being, clear boundaries between work and home life, and relentless experimentation with better and newer ways of working.
Being intentional about organizational culture also includes setting a tolerance threshold. Tony Hsieh, the legendary CEO of Zappos, famously said, “Even if someone’s great at their job, even if they’re a superstar at their job, if they’re bad for our culture we’ll fire them for that reason alone.”
Conclusion
Visionary physicist Geoffrey West considers organisms, cities and companies to be complex adaptive systems. Complex because once aggregated, their individual constituents take on collective characteristics. Adaptive because of their ability to evolve in response to changing external conditions. Complex adaptive systems learn by testing their assumptions and practices in a real-world environment and using feedback from the environment to grow. If the environment is dynamic, how can the assumptions and practices remain static? A successful organizational culture is one that not only endures but evolves.