Growth Culture Consulting

Growth culture is the set of behaviors a company actually rewards while it is growing, and whether those behaviors still work at the size it has reached. It is distinct from engagement, which measures how people feel, and from values, which describe how a company would like to be understood. Vivaldi has worked on strategy, organization and culture since 1999, from ten offices on four continents.

• Since 1999strategy and organization work
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation

When companies bring us in

This work is usually bought by a CEO, COO or chief people officer at a company that is growing and can feel something changing in how it operates. The trigger is rarely a survey result.

• The company has grown past the way it used to work. Decisions that one person used to make in a corridor now need four meetings, and nobody can point to when that changed or who decided it should.
• The second wave of hires cannot replicate the first. The people who built the growth still perform. The people hired to scale it do not, and the difference is not skill. It is that nobody has written down what good looks like here.
• Engagement is high and growth is flat. The survey says the organization is healthy. The numbers say it has stopped moving. Both are true, and the survey is not built to explain it.
• Speed was the advantage and process is eating it. Controls were added for good reasons, one at a time, and the cumulative effect is a company that is slower than the market it competes in.
• A new strategy asks for behavior the company does not currently reward. The strategy requires experiments, cross-unit work or commercial risk, and the promotion record shows none of those being rewarded.

Why engagement scores do not tell you whether you have a growth culture

Almost every company we meet already measures culture. They run an annual engagement survey, they track a participation rate, and they have a values statement that most employees can approximately recall. None of that answers the question a CEO is actually asking.

Engagement measures sentiment. It tells you whether people are satisfied, whether they intend to stay, and whether they would recommend the company. Those are worth knowing. They are also close to uncorrelated with whether the organization still does the things that produced its growth, because a company can be a very pleasant place to work and have quietly stopped taking commercial risk.

The failure mode is specific and it is common in companies that have grown past the size where everyone knows everyone. Growth was produced by a small group working with high discretion and short feedback loops. As the company scales, that discretion is withdrawn, usually for defensible reasons: a mistake was made, a control was added, an approval step was introduced. Each step is individually sensible. Together they remove the conditions that created the growth, and because every step was defensible, nobody is accountable for the result.

Three things make this hard to see from inside.

• The measurement is pointed at the wrong thing. Engagement instruments were designed to predict retention, not to predict whether a company can still move. A high score and a slowing business are not a contradiction. They are the ordinary reading of a comfortable plateau.
• Values describe intent, and the promotion record describes practice. If the stated culture prizes judgment and the last twelve promotions all went to people who were careful, the organization has learned what is true regardless of what is published.
• Culture work gets handed to the function least able to change incentives. It arrives in HR as a program of workshops and communications, when the levers that would change the behavior sit with whoever controls promotion, budget and what gets escalated.

The diagnostic is cheap. Take the last twelve promotions into leadership roles and the last five projects that were quietly stopped. Ask what behavior each decision rewarded. If the answer does not resemble the behavior your growth plan depends on, the problem is not engagement.

What our growth culture consulting services include

Five bodies of work. Each can be engaged on its own, and most companies need two or three.

1. Establishing what your growth actually requires

Before any culture work, we establish which behaviors the next phase of growth depends on, stated specifically enough to be observable, and then test whether the organization currently rewards them.

2. Reading the culture from decisions, not from opinions

We diagnose from the record of what the company did, because that is harder to flatter than a questionnaire.

• The promotion and exit record over two to three years, read for what it taught everyone watching about which behaviors are safe and which are career limiting
• What gets escalated, what gets approved without question, and how long a reversible decision takes to clear, which is usually the most honest single measure of whether a company can still move
• Where the stated values and the observed practice diverge, named as specific pairs rather than as a general gap, since a general gap cannot be acted on

3. Changing the mechanisms, not the messaging

Behavior follows consequence. We work on the small number of mechanisms that actually set consequence in an organization, which is a shorter list than most culture programs assume.

• Promotion criteria and who sits on the panel, since this is the clearest public statement a company makes about what it values
• How budget is allocated to things that might not work, and what happens to the sponsor when one of them does not
• Which decisions carry an approval and which do not, because discretion is the mechanism most quietly withdrawn as a company grows
• What the leadership team does in the first ten minutes of a bad result, which the organization reads more closely than anything written

4. Keeping speed while adding scale

A growing company has to add structure. The question is which structure and at what cost, and that question is answerable rather than philosophical.

• Which controls are genuinely required by risk, regulation or scale, and which were added in response to a single incident and never reviewed
• Where a reversible decision is being treated as an irreversible one, which is the most common and most expensive confusion in a scaling company
• How to onboard the second and third wave of hires into a way of working that was previously transmitted by proximity and is no longer transmitted at all

5. Making it hold through the leadership layer

Culture is set locally by whoever a person reports to. Work that stops at the executive team changes the language and not the experience.

• What the senior and middle leadership layer has to do differently, stated as decisions they make rather than as behaviors they should model
• Where leaders are being asked to work in a way they have not had to before, and what support that requires
• A small number of measures that show within two quarters whether decision speed, risk tolerance and ownership have actually moved

How a growth culture engagement works

1. Establish what growth requires. The behaviors the next phase of the plan depends on, described specifically enough that two people would agree whether they saw one. The output is a short list, not a framework.
2. Diagnose from the record. Promotions, exits, stopped projects, approval paths and decision latency, read against that list. We name what is working, because growing companies routinely dismantle the parts that still function.
3. Change the mechanisms. Promotion criteria, budget treatment of uncertain work, and which decisions carry an approval. We recommend the smallest set of changes that alters consequence, ahead of any program of communication.
4. Instrument and hold. Measures on decision speed, on who is being promoted and on whether uncertain work is still being funded, reviewed at two quarters. Sentiment is tracked but is not the test.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for growth culture work

Three reasons come up repeatedly in the briefs we win.

• We start from the growth plan, not from a culture model. We are a strategy firm. The behaviors we work on are derived from what the company intends to achieve commercially, which means the work has a test attached to it.
• We work on mechanisms rather than messaging. Workshops and value launches are cheap to run and easy to measure as activity. We prefer to change promotion criteria and approval thresholds, which is harder, slower and the only thing that reliably moves behavior.
• We tell you when the problem is not culture. A good share of what arrives as a culture brief is a structure problem, an incentive problem or a leadership capability problem. Naming it correctly is cheaper than running the wrong program well.

How to evaluate a growth culture consultant

Worth asking of anyone on your shortlist, including us.

• Ask what they will read before they survey anyone. A firm that opens with an instrument is measuring sentiment. The promotion record, the exit record and the approval paths are available now and say more.
• Ask which mechanisms they expect to change. If the answer is communications, training and a values refresh, the engagement will produce awareness. Awareness is not the constraint.
• Ask how the work connects to the growth plan. Culture work with no commercial test attached is very difficult to stop and very difficult to judge.
• Ask what they would tell you to keep. Scaling companies destroy functioning practices alongside broken ones. A consultant with nothing to protect has not looked properly.
• Ask what they measure at two quarters. Participation rates and sentiment movement are program metrics. Decision latency, who got promoted and whether uncertain work still gets funded are outcomes.

Growth culture consulting, an engagement survey vendor or a leadership program?

These are frequently bought as substitutes for one another, and they are not. A survey will tell you something is wrong and cannot tell you which mechanism caused it. A leadership program will build capability the organization may not currently permit anyone to use. Our view on organizational change management and on where growth actually stalls sets out where each one stops.

Related services

Growth culture is one of four capabilities in our cultural transformation group, and the boundaries matter when you are scoping.

• Cultural transformation consulting is the parent of this work and the right starting point for a broad, enterprise-wide culture change rather than a growth-specific one. If your question is general culture consulting rather than culture under growth, start there.
• Change management when one specific change has already been decided and has to land, with an end state and a date. Change management consulting is a different purchase from this one and is scoped there.
• Cultural strategy when the question is what the culture should be, expressed as purpose, values and principles, rather than why current behavior does not match the growth plan.
• Employee engagement when the constraint genuinely is how people feel about working here, including retention, advocacy and internal brand.
• Organizational design when structure and decision rights are the blockage. Design sets who decides. Culture sets what gets promoted, funded and forgiven.
• Leadership development and capability development when the behaviors are agreed and the organization cannot yet perform them.

If what you need is the growth plan itself rather than the culture that has to carry it, that work sits in growth strategy and in our wider growth strategy and innovation practice. This page sits inside People, Culture & Capabilities at Vivaldi, the strategy firm behind the Demand Landscape and the Interaction Field. Further reading: what engagement data does and does not tell you.

Growth culture consulting in the US and worldwide

Our culture and organization work runs out of ten offices on four continents, with the US team in New York. Scaling across markets adds a complication that single-market companies do not face: discretion that is genuinely devolved in one country is treated as provisional in another, so a growth culture defined centrally and announced globally produces real behavior change in some markets and polite compliance in the rest. We define the behaviors at the level of the decision rather than the value, which travels better, and we test the promotion record market by market rather than at group level. German and Swiss engagements run from our Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Munich and Zurich offices.