Top Culture Challenges for Your Growing Startup: Part 1
Startups are magical places.
Full of opportunity for advancement.
Groundbreaking. Disrupting an industry.
Building something no one has built before.
Unilaterally, startups promise a fun, supportive culture: “we’re like a family”. You can bring your dog to work, a work hard / play hard promise of happy hours, swag and ping pong.
Does this sound familiar to you? It is part of the promise when recruiting new hires at most startups.
Beneath all of that expectation of fun comes a blurring of the lines between professional and personal.
Watch out for early harassment issues.
If you look at your family, is it really a positive thing to say “we’re like a family”? Yes, we’ll often do anything for our families, but most of us have some kind of infighting, family drama, secrets, passive aggressive (or downright aggressive) behaviors, and more. We need to stop wearing “we’re like a family” as a badge of honor when describing our startup culture.
Let’s talk about some of the major pitfalls of startup culture so you can be on the lookout for them.
Opportunity
In the early stages of startup culture (into as late as Series C) -- the expectation of Opportunity typically means that your team will wear many hats and get to work on different types of projects. Your team members each might transition and own 4-5 different things (or more!) in a year. Series C becomes the inflection point where you’re hiring more, cementing your processes, and roles become defined. An individual’s scope of what they work on, and how much they can influence is limited. You need less renaissance people, and more specialists. This shift is subtle. And all of a sudden, you’ve hired more renaissance people than you have opportunities for. Team members hired during Series B probably had 6 months to 1 year from individual contributor to manager / owner of a special project. Where someone hired in Series C might wait years for that promised “opportunity” to own or manage something. Promotions start to slow down and take longer.
Culture tip: as you prepare for Series C, start to have proactive conversations with your HR / Talent teams and other Executives about how you’re describing opportunity and culture at your company.
You might be setting up people to expect one thing when your actions won’t follow through with that. They’ll become disgruntled, disengaged, and feel like they’re undervalued.
Pace & Pushing
Series C and D are an inflection point for increasing productivity per headcount. This is a dangerous road for your culture.
When you have a “crazy idea” or an “aha moment” (or more likely a sudden directive from your board), your instinct is to “rally the troops” and push your team to meet a fast turn around.
You remember the times when “everyone” meant 15 people all pulling a late night. You order pizza and beer to get the job done.
But now, you’ve got over a hundred team members (maybe double or triple that), and they’re all doing more than 40 hours a week.
Pushing to meet deadlines or quickly pivot isn’t by itself a problem -- but usually this isn’t a one off.
You’re tapping the “rally the troops” instinct week over week, drawing on the same pool of rockstar employees. Very quickly, your team is reaching burnout. “Too many meetings” or “always busy” should be red flags.
Always being asked to work into the evenings or weekends is exhausting.
Some people are happy to do it periodically -- and startups tend to attract people who love to work hard. We all have a breaking point.
Slowly, those nights and weekends are spent working on draining activities, instead of things we’re fired up to work on. Plus, as leaders (and people in general), we don’t give enough praise or recognition.
We feel an immense sense of pride for our team and the work they complete, but we hold ourselves and by extension, our company and employees to a high standard (frequently way too high). And so we’re always seeing areas for improvement or feedback. Forgetting to take time to acknowledge and celebrate where we are right now. And the work it took to get there.
Culture tip: Celebrate the wins. All of them.
Burnout can be halted when there’s an opportunity for a pause and to recoup energy after a big productivity push.
In addition to pushing our teams, we have to encourage and enable (or enforce) them to take breaks.
Bring in extra help when it’s needed (or before if you can).
Send people home, or give them your explicit permission to take an afternoon or a day off with pay.
TAKE ACTION
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“Once you break past your own limited worldview and lens, your awareness changes. Awareness is the first step towards behavior change.”
(c) 2019 - 2024 Katie McLaughlin, McLaughlin Method
