The Mistake of Prioritising Performance over Culture

What is your primary motivation for starting a business venture? Money, wealth, fame, a cause, a problem to be solved, a vision you want to bring to life? If you are clear about the Why, your startup usually succeeds. For those who pretend to have clarity of purpose, life teaches you with time 😊.

Similarly, for scaling up your business also, you need total clarity of purpose. So that you avoid the 8th Mistake, of not choosing the right culture and performance in your organisation.

It is no secret that with a ruthless focus on performance, one can quickly scale. But it is almost impossible to sustain that scale without the right culture. When you become impatient to achieve results and to make more and more money in less time, your organisation's culture invariably takes a backseat. In fact, the lust for results and performance itself becomes the culture of your organisation.

Now, do not misunderstand this. In case you are thinking that I am going to urge you to run your organisation in an altruistic or selfless manner, that is far from my intention 🙈. On the contrary, I believe that results and performance are non-negotiable, and I recommend that you build a solid approach towards results and performance.

I am not even encouraging you to setup a "culture of performance". But then, you might have already done that. If your people experience fear, comparison, and lust for results and have become obsessed with their goals, a culture of performance has already taken root. Unfortunately, this culture does not create an enterprise. It creates a money-spinning sweatshop. And in case your desire is only to produce money and fame, you should not be reading this series at all. Remember, our goal here is Scaling up Joyfully. I write for those who wish to create enterprises, not businesses or shops.

Culture is the set of values that define your individual and organisational conduct. It is the essence and the positioning of your brand. For example, when you think "Volvo", you think "safety", but when you think "Rolls Royce", what comes to mind? When you see "Toyota", you see "economy", but when you see a "Mercedes Benz", what do you see? Similarly, what comes to your mind when you think "Apple" vs. "Microsoft"? Or even "TATA" vs. "Reliance"?

Culture is never "good" or "bad". It is what it is. There will always be some form of culture in every organisation. In most cases, if the culture is not set consciously, it automatically becomes agri-culture - like a farmer decides which seeds to sow after each harvest. Be it an organisation or a family, whoever is in the driver's seat dictates the culture.

For lasting scale, culture needs to be introduced and then sustained through a constant investment of time, money, and efforts. With this approach, you develop a conscious culture (instead of letting an unconscious culture take shape). Culture is much like crops on a farm. If you do not till the land and prepare it for cultivating your desired crop, weeds will automatically grow. Unconscious culture is pretty much like these weeds.

Sustaining scale in an organisation full of weeds will always be tricky. I often witness that after growing in size, organisations struggle endlessly. As long as there are some heroes in the organisations and the market conditions are favourable, they continue to scale. But when the going gets tough, they falter and start to wither away. Such organisations never become enterprises.

If you want to scale joyously, set up your organisation's culture consciously. Make both, culture and performance, non-negotiable. In the 2020 book, The Power of And - Responsible Business Without Trade-Offs, authors R. Edward Freeman, Kirsten E. Martin, and Bidhan L. Parmar disprove the conventional wisdom that there are unavoidable trade-offs between acting ethically and succeeding financially.

Make an effort to set up the culture NOW and then take sustained effort to instil it into your organization's DNA. Else, remember, it will not be your organisation at all! Over time, you will become a stranger within it, and then lose interest in nurturing it. You will be surrounded by people you do not agree with and feel stressed going to your own workplace. Soon you will start talking fancy words like retirement, sabbaticals, time-off, and breaks.

Culture is who you really are. Performance is where you wish to be. Do not compromise on either. Strive for more, not less.

In your journey of scaling up, never ever make this mistake of prioritising performance over Culture.