Culture is one of my favorite topics as it’s so critical to successful organizations. I’ve seen OK cultures and I’ve seen amazing cultures — the amazing ones always grow faster and outperform their peers. Only, scaling a strong culture is hard as there’s much more complexity.
Here are a few thoughts on scaling culture:
- Implement a culture check team to interview every potential hire
- Run a culture-oriented hiring process
- Reinforce the core values with each quarterly check-in
- Design career paths for every team member
- Put the culture front and center with the Simplified One Page Strategic Plan
Once the team grows beyond the co-founders, it’s time to start thinking about culture. As the startup finds product/market fit and a repeatable customer acquisition process, culture needs to be intentional.
What else? What are some more ideas for scaling culture in a fast-growing startup?
David Cummings on Startups 
David, I express enough how internalizing this practice has shaped how I grow as an individual, build, invest, predict, advise and guide.
I may be overstating on of your points, but recognizing examples where culture postively impacted customer success or growth..
Question back to you.: What steps/suggestions would you have for a mid-afternoon size company on making a shift toward culture driven growth.
Some other helpful tools like I really like:
– Catalytic coaching (http://energage.com/solutions/catalytic-coaching/). Excellent at helping your employees express where they want to go with their careers and matching up with where the organization needs to go.
– Testing employee engagement. The Gallup 12 question survey will identify how engaged your team is and areas where management needs to work harder. Can be a really good starting point to see where management needs to focus right now.