Does Your Culture Help Your Organization Grow?
I find a familiar challenge in nearly every strategic planning process I lead. We can talk for hours about programs, budgets, and expansion, and everyone leans in. But the moment the conversation turns to culture, people get careful. Because culture is the one subject where we are all implicated, and where the honest answer might be about us. Culture is sensitive. It is slow to change. It is hard to measure, and it never fits neatly on a plan. And everyone sees culture from their own seat, through their own blind spots. The leader sees people who won't step up. The employee sees a leader who won't let go. Both are sincere. Both are partly right. And both are a little blind to their own part in it. An organization can have talented people, real resources, and a smart plan, and still stall on old patterns: decisions wait, responsibilities blur, and capable people sit tight while leaders solve the same problems again and again. The plan is rarely the problem. The culture is the everyday habits and expectations that quietly decide how the work gets done. And here is the part most people miss: the very habits that made us successful are often the ones we now have to give up. |
When the organization outgrows its old ways
In a small organization, one person can know every client, approve every expense, and hold it all together through hallway conversations. It works beautifully, until it doesn't. As you grow, the work becomes interconnected. More people need information, decisions call for expertise no single person has, and what one person once handled alone now takes a team.
But the old expectations linger, usually unspoken. Everyone still goes to the founder. Someone is handed results to deliver without the authority the results require. Then, when it stalls, we call it a staffing problem, when the real issue is how the work is organized. The leader wonders why no one takes initiative. The employee wonders why they should, when every decision they make gets reversed. Neither is wrong. They are both stuck in an agreement nobody ever wrote down. That is why culture belongs in your growth plans, not as a soft afterthought but as real work. If the future needs more collaboration and more independent judgment, we have to build those capabilities on purpose. And that starts by deciding, honestly, what is worth keeping.
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I had to change, too
I once led an organization that grew from one person, me, to over 100. Somewhere along the way I realized something humbling: I had become the bottleneck I kept complaining about. Every important decision ran through me, and I told myself that was diligence. It was really a habit I had outgrown, and my team had quietly organized itself around waiting for me.
I did not figure this out alone. We drew on hired expertise and on our board. One board member, who had run a major company's human resources department, led us through a day of team building. I walked out having learned things about my own people, and about myself, that I had been too busy to see. It reminded me that asking for outside help is not a weakness in leadership. It is part of the job.
Our team building turned into a yearly retreat, every single summer without fail. It was invaluable to our growth and sense of teamwork.
I also worked with a CEO coach, and one of my very first lessons was embarrassingly simple. In my one-on-ones, I showed up with my agenda: my questions, my to-do list, my priorities. Then we flipped it. My direct reports would bring their agenda, and my standing opener became four words: “Glad you're here. How can I help?” It felt strange at first, but that change rewired the meetings. They took ownership, and my role became clearer. It was a plain lesson in culture: the way I ran a routine meeting had been telling people, every week, that thinking ahead was my job, not theirs.
My behavior had to change before theirs could.
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The team has to be ready for the success it seeks
A current client brings this into sharp focus. The organization has a board with amazing potential that genuinely wants to do more. The ambition is real. But through my internal discussions, I discovered the team isn’t ready to meet what that ambition throws at it. And they are tired of saying so.
That gap is where good opportunities go to die. Leaders need timely responses, accurate information, and the confidence that the organization will follow through. In that sense, it is a customer service issue, and the customers are the board and donors. But someone has to identify the issue and be willing to face it. It’s not laziness or complaining; it’s a mismatch between need and capabilities. And this mismatch has to be dealt with openly, not buried.
Where do we need clearer ownership, better coordination, or more capacity? Leadership must provide the time and tools to meet higher expectations, because asking an already stretched team to simply do more is not a plan; it is a wish. Raising the goals cannot run ahead of developing the organization's ability to deliver. And the culture must encourage this discussion to take place.
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Address what holds the team back
Sometimes the obstacle is an outdated process or an unclear role. And sometimes, if we are honest, it is a person: someone who withholds information, resists every change, or insists on controlling decisions that belong to others. One person's behavior can slow an entire team, and when leadership looks away, everyone quietly learns which standards actually matter around here. That’s culture.
In my favorite business book, Good to Great, Jim Collins describes getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats, and knowing when someone needs to step off. Read Collins’s excerpt here. These are hard, human calls, especially when the relationships go back years. But the rest of the team is watching, and everyone benefits from a place where the hard things get handled.
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Protect it through everyday leadership
You can identify culture at a retreat, but you can’t fix it there. You fix it in the small, daily choices people are always watching; who gets recognized, whose behavior gets excused, and what happens the moment someone brings bad news. Those signals teach far more than any values statement ever will. So if you are preparing to grow, start small, and start honest.
Growth asks people to create a different future, and our job as leaders is to make sure the organization actually gives them a way to succeed together.
That work is slow, it is personal, and it is worth it. And as I learned, more than once, it usually begins with changing the culture, starting at the top.
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