How to protect organisational culture while growing

How does it feel to work where you work?

How would you describe your organisational culture? Is there a dominant type of personality?

You might view the overriding energy in your workplace as competitive, driven, demanding and direct. Your leaders have pressing goals to meet in a fast-growing business, but at what cost to the team?

Or perhaps your culture has a strong coaching and mentoring feel - largely non-confrontational with a focus on compassion, trust, pride and loyalty? But does your organisation adjust quickly and efficiently to change, especially if you’re scaling fast?

You might instead describe your organisation as highly structured, precise and orderly, with a strong leaning towards formal processes, consistency and tireless attention to detail. Can you also describe yourselves as agile, flexible, innovative embracers of change?

You can see where we’re going with this. Perhaps your culture is collaborative, creative, dynamic and entrepreneurial. Great for scaling businesses. Your leaders encourage risk, initiative and freedom. But are there also many unfinished projects and a lack of focus in some areas?

Fast growth can challenge organisational culture

We’ve noticed that in fast-growth organisations, the everyday ‘feel’ can become disconnected from the culture the founding leaders envisaged.

Rapid expansion and rising staff numbers can threaten the strong camaraderie and shared sense of belonging built in the earlier years. Although ‘unifying’ organisational values were agreed and enshrined at the outset, not everyone lives to those values as the pace of productivity quickens and employees feel increasingly further away from the founders. The balance feels off. Unexpected tensions, blockers and communication barriers may creep in, despite the teams being committed and hard-working. The overall culture and ethos no longer sits right.

If this sounds familiar, and your working environment feels lopsided, with one dominant type of energy, or if your leaders are struggling to live their stated values, it’s time to reflect and adjust.  It may be time, in every division/function/business area, to assess the team mix, team dynamics and the impact of recent changes on the organisational culture.

Insights Discovery helps you shape and safeguard the culture you want to achieve

Our experience is that you can make a choice to create or shift organisational culture by identifying who gets energy from what, and making sure the team approach is right for the current business phase.

The Insights Discovery four-colour model of preferences does this by uncovering and exploring our ingrained behavioural choices and preferred approaches to work.

Team assessments and greater awareness is where it starts. Across the organisation, you need to understand each team’s current culture and way of working, and what lies behind it.

The Insights Discovery process means boosting your awareness of what style of teamwork you actually need to thrive in a fast-growth phase, and how the blend of characteristics in each team could work more effectively together.

Does direct and challenging work well as it could with collaborative and creative? Does orderly and structured sit well with consultative and nurturing?

If you’re undergoing rapid growth and constant change, some working styles may be more effective than others. What’s more, the blend of styles in your teams may not be working as well as it could as the needs of the business change.

Let’s look briefly at the four main energies that Insights Discovery uncovers. All four colours have equal value and everyone uses all four colour energies to varying degrees. It’s the unique ordering and degree of energies that shapes our personal style...

Our preference for one or two colour energies indicates our dominant or preferred style of thinking, decision making, interacting, working and communicating.

The common language of colour provides a simple memorable foundation for discussing how we behave and see others as behaving.

It’s useful to think about teams in terms of what appears to matter most to those individuals. Is it:

Focus        Being constantly results-oriented with a determined shared purpose?
Flow         Staying agile, dynamic and working collaboratively?
Climate     Creating a climate of trust, cooperation and cohesion?
Process     Seeking orderly, effective working methods and measurement?

In large and small organisations of every kind, Insights Discovery can help to assess a team’s current working environment.

Understanding why individuals communicate, interact and collaborate the way they do is the first step to high-performance.
By identifying which individual colour preferences make up the team, leaders can start to understand more fully the team characteristics and dominant behaviour types. Interactive exercises help to create action plans that introduce different ways of working and improve team cohesion and effectiveness.

Which of the four colour energies is your organisation’s primary influence?

What do you need more or less of at this point in time?

Introducing the Team Wheel…

The Insights Team Wheel gives us an opportunity to understand behavioural styles in a holistic and visual manner. By mapping each colleague’s individual Insights Discovery profile results, the wheel shows leaders, at a glance, the make-up of their teams in terms of dominant colour energy, preference and outlook. Crucially, we get to observe whether teams are made up of individuals clustered heavily on one side or area of the wheel.

Leaders can then choose concrete actions to dial up the less present (or uncomfortably absent!) colour energies in the situations that demand them.

These are vital conversations for making human capital decisions. Ignore the pain points, and you risk stalling true growth at a time when your organisation simply can’t afford to slow down.

What might team pain points look like?

Too much Cool Blue energy might mean slipping towards a stagnant, static culture that lacks agility. There may be great structure, order and consistency, but if you sense that you’re not innovating or adapting well to new influences, you might need to apply more dynamic, collaborative Sunshine Yellow energy.

Too much Earth Green might feel as if your organisation is over-sensitive and resistant to change. While the nurturing, consultative approach works well, consider adding in more Fiery Red energy to bring in focus, pace, accountability and momentum towards goals. This may be especially important in fast-growth phases.

Too much Sunshine Yellow energy might mean boundless creative ideas and half-finished, detail-scarce projects. The enthusiasm is energising but the lack of focus may be distracting. Introduce more precise, fact- and logic-based Cool Blue energy to bring sharper focus to the ‘why’ and ‘how’.

Too much Fiery Red energy might mean an overly direct and challenging environment. The preference for control, fast action and quick results can feel almost coercive to other personality types. Consider dialling up the Earth Green element to bring in more active listening, empathy and diplomacy and engage people on your dynamic, fast-growth journey. This is especially important if your teams are working mostly or completely remotely.

Every team member can use different colour energies in their behaviour, even their least dominant ones. The key is to understand respect the perfectly valid differences within the team, and to appreciate that there is always a choice when approaching tasks or responding to particular people and situations.

What does balancing team dynamics by colour energy look like in practice?

• By sharing individual Insights Discovery profiles and working collaboratively, leaders can not only work out where imbalances may lie; they can also help colleagues identify the most contrasting colour energy types in their teams. Observe together the strengths and challenges, and how each type of behaviour can affect the rest of the group and certain ‘opposite’ individuals.
• Pay close attention to where the biggest gaps are in your team. Do those gaps (or clusters) around the Team Wheel jeopardise progress towards your goals and present recurring barriers to great teamwork (and business success)? If the Team Wheel shows the majority leaning towards one side or one ‘corner’, review whether certain tasks might best be shared /discussed (for perspective) with other individuals.
• Help them flex: explore with colleagues how they can adjust their approach and their communication styles (including listening. coaching and conflict management) to suit different situations and personalities. Remind them that their default approach isn’t always the most fitting and might not help everyone feel as connected and motivated as they could.
• Consider boosting absent or impractically infrequent colour energies by engaging colleagues from other teams within the organisation, or from outside. Certain projects or stages of a company’s evolution may demand more of a certain type of energy to achieve their goals.

In short, Insights Team Effectiveness workshops help teams make significant breakthroughs by creating a safe space for open and honest dialogue. They use this to move beyond current barriers and issues.

Using their unique personal profile results as a springboard, teams and co-leaders can tackle the challenges standing between them and peak performance, and to help create an environment that inspires them to do their best work.

So, how might your cross-organisation Team Wheels look right now? Are you confident that they all reflect your stated values, your desired culture and the immediate and emerging needs of your business?

A real-world example of how Insights empowers companies to scale without losing its culture...

To read more about how Insights worked to transform Nzime while protecting it's culture, continue here to the case study

About  Insights Discovering Leadership Effectiveness

High-performing teams are non-negotiable for successful organisations. Teams can learn from their past and prepare for their future, by having conversations that will improve their performance - today.

Discovering Team Effectiveness tackles your most pressing team challenges on two fronts: How a team works together- and how this aligns with how each individual likes to work. The result is positive, healthy, and high-performing teams across your organisation. Learn more here