I want to scale, why does my org. culture matter?

Growing your business without taking your org. culture into consideration is like creating a career path for yourself without considering your personality (and that happens ALL the time!). Right? You’re fresh out of high school and you must decide what you will become for the rest of your life. What a hard thing! So, you do what most of us do: you choose what has worked for those around you or you simply listen to what others say you would be good at. You enroll in that class, work your ass off, and suddenly…is 8 years later and you hate your job.

That’s why entrepreneurs need to consider their organizational cultures as they grow (not after!). When I ask entrepreneurs to describe their organizational culture, most of them throw a combination of words like: “friendly”, “flexible”, “like a family”, “chaotic”, or, if they have spent time discovering their culture, they would recite their vision, mission and/or values. What I love about this question is that it makes CEOs uncomfortable, like I just asked them to describe their personality. That’s because it’s kind of similar.

Organizational culture is to an organization what personality is to a person; that deep set of characteristics that make us (or an organization) unique. Think about it, when you don’t consider your personality traits when choosing a career path, you end up in a career that - not only wastes gifts but doesn’t feel yours. Like the introvert working in a busy customer service position for 8 hours a day or the linguist who loves to travel that spends her days behind a computer writing code.

The same happens when entrepreneurs fail to consider their business’ culture as they scale. They implement changes without considering the unique characteristics that can support or stunt their growth, their org. culture gets diluted, and onboarding new members becomes hard. Org. culture is the perfect foundation on which to start any organizational development processes. They say: “Know Thyself”, I say “Know thy culture!”