Building Culture for Scale

When I think about building culture for large organisations, I often look up to policymakers at a country level. I wonder what challenges they face in governing a country and how they go about drafting policies or making decisions at a scale that large. I believe they take the core tenets as their true north, build policies around them, and try to change their people's behaviour by framing these policies.

The same principles apply to building culture for an organisation that is scaling up. We need to figure out what is core to us - what is the stardust we wish to seek and the baggage we’d like to drop - and how we can integrate this into our system and our subsystems. The subsystems for an organisation are its verticals (functions, divisions) and/or its horizontals (cross-functional teams). In either case, the fundamental unit building these subsystems is always the team.

While building culture for scale, it is important to think at the level of the team. How do we consciously communicate and live the core DNA of our culture in the team? How do we build processes and policies that influence and govern the subsystems? How do we strengthen the relationships within and between the subsystems and with the system as a whole?

This requires intentional and continuous efforts. Culture weaving is never complete because it is not a one-time exercise. There is no happily ever after. The dynamics of the organisation are constantly changing. New people join in, invoking a sense of competition and envy that invariably comes into play. Some people exit, leaving their team members with a sense of grief. There may be department changes, role changes, and restructuring. Such changes bring anxiety into teams and further influence the culture. This is why it is crucial to relook at and re-question the reality of how people perceive culture and do some deep work around it every 12 to 18 months. I feel that the efforts must get deeper as the organisation gets more complex.

Internal changes coupled with a volatile market often misguide us into feeling that culture is something that can be fixed later. We prioritise chasing our revenue or targets first and mending the culture afterwards. It doesn’t work that way. Culture is experienced in how we perform business - how we interact with our customers, vendors, suppliers, and team members. Any action we take either contributes to our culture or takes something away from it. A core value of our culture must become embedded in our day-to-day functioning and cannot be something that we keep going back to fix. These actions that help us demonstrate our values are what we call the ‘Big Little Things’.

Part 2 of this series on ”Building Culture for Scale” will talk more about these Big Little Things and the key role leadership plays in culture weaving.