Prevention is better than cure. Hence, before we talk about how to change /come out of bad culture situation in an organization, it is important to understand how we can be proactive about preventing it.
So, as an entrepreneur, at what stage should you give a serious thought about (or be concerned) about the culture of your organization? There are typically 3 stages.
Stage 1: For an astute founder, the answer is before you even sign-up your co-founder(s), and/or hire your first employee. Why? Because the first team you have (including you) will lay the foundation for the kind of culture your organization will eventually have. While having complementary skills for co-founders has been widely discussed across multiple articles/blogs, I believe it is also important to have same/similar core values and beliefs for co-founders.
In fact, one of the major reasons for startups floundering is because its co-founders stop seeing eye to eye once initial euphoria settles down into regular grind work.
Stage 2: Okay, so you were preoccupied to worry much about it at the above stage and still want to ensure that you have a robust culture at work place. All is not lost! You can still work on it grounds up, when you think about putting in the first layer of management between you and the team. Before you choose the intermediate leaders, ensure that you have a clear vision about how you’d what your organization culture to be, and choose (the right) people into those leadership roles that would help you achieve that vision.
It is but obvious that, when business starts gaining firm ground and focus shifts to scaling, there comes a time when it becomes difficult for founder(s) to manage all aspects of work by themselves, hence the need for identifying and installing a layer of managers/leaders to take on some of the work, so that founders can focus on fewer things better. While it would differ from team to team, on an average, it happens anywhere organization reaching the size of 30 to 50+.
Stage 3: Missed the bus again? Well, anything that happens beyond above two scenarios that would be more like fixing (changing) the culture rather than building it grounds up. It would need to be a well thought out, designed and executed change intervention, preferably in consultation with some external agency.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast everyday” – Peter Drucker
Remember, once set, culture change of an organization will not happen overnight. In fact larger the size of the organization, more time, effort and resources it would consume to bring in the desired culture change. From my experience, depending upon the size of the organization, it would take anything between 6 to 36+ months for such a project to bear fruit.
As alluded to in my earlier post, more we delay (as an organization/entrepreneur/founder) addressing this, higher the cost to fix/change it.
This blog addresses the question of ‘When’ to start paying attention to organization culture. ‘What should be our organization culture like’ & ‘How to change the DNA/Culture of our organization’ are too organization specific and, hence would need deeper engagement with the organization. Even in same business verticals, the culture of two organizations will be significantly distinct, and that is absolutely fine!
This is primarily addressed towards entrepreneurs / corporate leaders. I’d be writing a separate one from ‘employee perspective’ (what can you do if find yourself out of sync with the culture of your organization).
