How to Grow a Family Business While Maintaining the Culture
Culture is everything for many family businesses. In fact, the culture is often what makes a family business special. Inevitably, the need to grow and change can feel at odds with the culture that in some cases dates back 100 years.
Company cultures can change for many reasons. Often companies find their cultures start shifting with success. The number of employees increases, locations are added, and acquisitions bring new cultures into the workforce. On the flip side, growth may start slowing, business pressures increase, and younger employees have different expectations. These factors all point to the need to start doing and thinking about things differently.
The question on many CEOs’ minds is, “How do you maintain the best parts of our family business culture while growing the company?”
There are three main solutions to this dilemma:
1) Strategic planning process that models the desired culture
2) Intentional focus on culture building
3) Hiring leaders who embody the desired culture
Strategic Planning: In a family business the company’s values tend to play a bigger role than in other types of firms. Often one of those values is employee engagement. One CEO pulled together the top 25 leaders to participate, for the first time, in the strategic planning process. This elevated the strategic thinking among that group and started to coalesce a critical mass of leaders who felt ownership for the direction of the business. By involving them in the strategic planning process, emphasizing the company’s values, the CEO helped the culture live on and remain integral to future success.
Culture Building: In another family business, the CEO and senior executive team started getting feedback that aspects of their culture were not working for the newer members of the workforce. Younger talent felt like they were not listened to, and just had to learn “how we do things around here.” For older members of the senior leadership team, this was hard to imagine, since they believed the culture is what made them great.
Ultimately, the senior team embarked on a journey to discover what they needed to keep and what they needed to change. Then they built custom-designed modules to address the ways of thinking and working that they wanted to instill in the organization. Internal HR and business leaders were trained to deliver the modules. They preserved their culture, while updating it to meet the needs of the business and their evolving workforce.
Hire the Right Leaders: Often growth in family businesses means hiring a few key people from the outside. It goes without saying that hiring leaders who have both a great cultural fit and the needed skills to take the organization to the next level is the golden ticket. If you realize you made a mistake, correct it quickly and graciously so the organization can move on.