Culture plays a significant role in the success of any business – big or small. Peter Drucker’s old adage is true,

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast!”

So when you are scaling your business and the team is growing, it is vital to get the culture right.

But what is the right culture, how do you assess what you have and what you need and how does it need to evolve as you scale-up?

In this toolkit we outline the importance of using process to understand and define your company culture, how to utilise Organisation Culture Theory, and how to adopt the common attributes of organisations that have high-performance cultures.

Below there is a suggested process of four steps:

1. Where have you come from?
   

   Look backwards and consider where you’ve come from, the history of the business, what key events have created the business that you know now and what of the past do you not want to lose as you grow?

2. Where are you now?
   

   Using both an internal and an external lens review the culture now – how does it look, how does it feel, what is happening in terms of the way people work together, how are you selling the opportunity to future team members?Learn what your customers and suppliers/partners say about your culture, based on their experience. This is important because our ability to recognise the culture we are in can diminish over time as we habituate to it so using those with a fresh perspective is always helpful.

3. Where do you need to be in 10 years?
   

   Perhaps the most challenging – look towards the next ten-year horizon, in much the same way as you might be planning your strategy for the next ten years, it is as important to reflect on what type of organisation you might be when you reach this point – again using the internal and external lens – what will be different, how might you need to be organised to continue to be successful?

4. Where do you need to go next?
   

   The final stage is to consider where you need to go next, and what initial changes need to happen to the culture to support the scale-up journey. Be aware of the challenge of cultural homeostasis – the dynamic energy that works to maintain the current culture and thwart attempts to change it. It means we need to uncover the ‘hidden loyalties’ as part of the process and we can do this using the following three-way grouping method.

How to Scale.ai

Frog’s new AI powered search engine

Over the past 6 years Frog’s team of Operating Partners have produced over 100 toolkits, podcasts, articles and videos in our ‘How to Scale’ library, as part of our Scale-Up Methodology to help software companies scale.

Now we have put them all together in a ring-fenced, customised generative AI tool to make it as simple as possible to get the information you want.