Culture Care Technologies
  Human Resource & Organization Development Specialists in Company Culture

Does a Start-up or Small Business Need to Manage its Culture?

Size doesn't matter. No company is too small not to have to manage its culture. Once two or more people come together in the pursuit of a common objective, a culture of shared assumptions and norms begins to form. The key question is how effective is it in integrating members' thinking towards accomplishing the mission, implementing strategic change initiatives and, over the long term, realizing the vision.

If the answer to this question is “marginally”, “not very” or “could be better”, then there's a role for managed cultural learning and development in a startup or small business:

Start-ups Although a new company doesn't have a culture on the first day of operation, one is beginning to form. The actions of founders have a powerful influence on its development. They bring their prior experience and underlying beliefs and values to addressing the challenges faced by the new company. As their prescriptions (along with their underlying assumptions) are adopted and shared by others, a culture begins to grow. This adoption and sharing are part of a collective learning process.

Actively managing the learning of a new culture takes time: a scarce commodity for start-ups. So the new culture is generally left to develop on its own, although not entirely. For most start-ups do take the time to document the strategic foundations of culture -- mission and vision statements – and many record several values for guiding behaviour. But beyond these first steps, culture development is largely unattended.

For example, the toughest (and most neglected) initial task in culture development is negotiating agreement on the core beliefs required to accomplish the mission and realize the company's vision of a preferred future. And even when all the foundation components of culture are documented – mission, vision, values, beliefs – they're rarely used as the basis of an ongoing tightly managed collective learning process.

Of course there's a payoff in making the time, from day one, to actively manage this largely unattended learning process. It saves a start-up from the time consuming process of having to change an unmanaged culture, that has become ineffective, further down the road.

Small business A small business often has more time than a start-up to address culture, but is faced with the double-sided task of changing an existing culture. Its members need to collectively unlearn current shared cultural assumptions and norms before learning new ones.

In comparison to a large organization facing the same task, a small business has the advantage of proximity – members in closer physical proximity with a greater opportunity for, and relative ease of, interaction and face-to-face communication. Since shared cultural assumptions and norms are learned interactively, and then held among and between members of an organization, they can only be changed interactively. That's why teams are the ideal venue for cultural learning. And physically, a small business is more like a team than a large organization.

Some businesses are purposefully small and chose to remain so. In them, cultural learning and change will very much resemble the same processes within a team of a larger organization.

Other companies may have been small for some time, have an effective culture, but are now on the verge of a desired growth spurt. A rapid increase in employees can strain the capacity of a small firm's culture to align the thinking and activities of all its members. The focus in this situation will be on maintaining the existing culture -- particularly if high growth is expected to continue over the long term. This typically includes a rigorous application of the shared cultural beliefs and values in the hiring process and orientation of new members.