Consistency.  It’s not the sexiest subject in leadership, and frankly it rarely comes up directly in the conversations with the Founders and teams we are working with when they share their challenges.  Yet it is the unsung hero of cultures that scale. Consistency matters most in a few key areas; how we make and keep agreements, how we live our values, and how we coordinate and integrate activities across departments.

Let’s start with values

Let’s start with values. There has been enough focus on values in business over the past few years that even the youngest companies we meet with have done some work on values.  More mature companies might have them painted on the walls.  But what really matters about values is that they are practiced.  We talk about culture as “the way things are done around here.”  If your stated value is innovation, but risk taking that fails is punished – even in subtle ways – your actions say that value is not real.

One of the most telling questions in the Denison Culture survey has to do with living values. The question  “there are consequences for acting outside of the values in this organization” is often a fail, even for organizations that perform high otherwise on the survey.   When we dig a little deeper, we often learn that the “why” of this fail is about consistency.  Employees believe that values are applied differently within different departments or in different situations.

One department uses them and another doesn’t.  Leadership uses them unless money is involved.  When values are in conflict, the final decision seems arbitrary and the values struggle that may have been behind a difficult decision it is not shared with the larger team.”

Implementing values into your startup

To be a values-driven organization, leadership teams need to seek alignment about what the values mean, and what actions would be taken in situations that challenge the values. Run scenarios. Talk it through. Challenge each other respectfully before the real issue is at hand. When you’ve found alignment, begin living the values by asking employees to share how decisions they are making align with the values. If there’s a pivot or major event, share how the values shaped the conversation.  Create an environment where employees feel safe to challenge each other and management on the values behind major decisions.  Most importantly, seek consistency across the entire organization on values-driven behaviors.

Making and keeping agreements

Another important aspect of consistency for scaling companies is the ability to make and keep agreements.  We’re not talking about contracts here.  But we are talking about the ability to create agreements on an on-going basis that work, and importantly an explicit language for understanding that you have an agreement, and follow-through that creates the expectation that “the way we do things” is to keep our agreements – or communicate if we can’t.

At the heart of good agreements is great and complete communication.  Creating a safe environment for communicating information that might seem risky to share, or hard to articulate is perhaps the most important role that a leadership team can take in a company.  If employees don’t feel that they can safely say whatever needs to be said for the success of the company, they are certainly not going to challenge each other (or more importantly, the executives) when agreements are not kept.   Essentially we all want to know what we can count on.  In business, employees want to have the tools to do their jobs, the empowerment to make the decisions they need to make to do their job, and they want to know what they can count on each other and management for.   Making good agreements, keeping agreements, and communicating clearly when they can’t be keep is a high-performing organization marker.

Coordination and integration

Perhaps the biggest challenge we see for companies that are scaling fast is coordination and integration.  Suddenly a company of 6 people is a company of 25 and there are different departments responsible for different things. It’s no longer possible to sit around for an hour over a beer and be “caught up” on everything that is going on. Different departments have to respond to customers, create new products and problem solve in a rapid manner.  And typically there is no consistency across departments as this happens.  It seems like a more or less constant firefight.

The importance of process

The framework for consistency is process.  Yet often, the companies we are working with have a bit of a meltdown when we suggest that they need to define, train and instill processes throughout the company.  The worry is a shift from the “go-go” everybody on all the time, we just fix it as we see it kind of culture of a start-up to a bureaucracy that is unwieldy and laborious.  But good process is our friend.  What would coding be without process?  In fact, the Latin root for the word process is to “go forward.”  In the modern use of the word, a process is that which articulates how to most successfully, and in a repeatable fashion, achieve great results.

Processes are often cross-functional and multidisciplinary and can drive coordination and integration. Last year we helped an awesome WA financial tech company develop their Product Development Process.  As we were defining the process we were also dealing with the pain left from mistakes and stall outs that have been caused by not having a process. Now every department in the company is engaged at the right time and in the right way with new product development.   The tug of war between marketing, technology and customer service gets mediated before a new product is built.  It allows everyone to be ready and enthusiastic for the challenges that come with growing even faster when a new product is released. It helps them ask the questions they need to ask before they spend so much money on development that they are embarrassed or afraid to turn back.

From customer service to product development to employee development – the only way to be sure that you are truly integrating as you grow is to create the processes that you need when you need them.