Situation: A CEO’s company is facing rapid growth. The CEO is concerned that the cordial team culture that he has carefully nurtured will be strained as the company adapts to this growth. The present culture is characterized by lack of politics and truthful, frank communications. How do you keep your culture in the face of rapid growth?

Advice from the CEOs:

• The company currently markets its culture, complemented by a solid history of performance. Clients receive highly personalized service at a competitive cost. This combination attracts and retains clients.
• The company’s employees are a happy, competent group that enjoys what they are doing. This differentiates the company from other firms all by itself.
• Identify the key attributes of the company’s culture. This will simplify internal and external communication when discussing what makes the culture special.
• Use one several tools available to develop behavioral profiles of the current employees. This will help to understand how team members interact with each other. It will also help to build profiles for ideal additional employees as the team expands.
• Hire an expert do a formal evaluation of the team around individual and group dynamics, as well as bottlenecks in the current structure and culture. This will help determine how scalable the company’s current culture is.
• Grow at the rate the company’s culture allows, not at the rate that salespeople bring in new business. With gradual, careful growth size will less of an issue as it would be if the company were to simply grow as fast as possible.
• The more the company grows organically – through additional business from existing clients – the fewer additional clients the company needs to meet growth objectives. This means adding fewer new employees to maintain target client/employee ratios.
• If the plan is to grow larger, consider growing around core groups of 9-12 employees, perhaps in distinct locations with good communication between the groups. In the military, operating groups are 9 to 12 soldiers; the more specialized and highly trained the group the more it tends toward 9 soldiers instead of 12.
• There is a Zen saying that a healthy tree grows as tall as it can. Use this as your guide.
• The key role of the CEO is as CCO – Chief Culture Officer!

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