Managing organizational culture as your revenue team grows

In periods of rapid revenue growth, your revenue team will also have to grow to keep up with demand. While this is an exciting time for your company - challenges can arise when it comes to your culture.

Chief Revenue Officers and revenue leaders should step up to ensure your organization’s culture is maintained during this growth period. Including emphasizing company values in onboarding, hiring for culture fit, and leading by example.

This article covers:

Why is organizational culture important?

Organizational culture is the shared set of values, attributes, beliefs, standards, purposes, and behaviors held and maintained by your employees.

A strong, positive workplace culture helps to create a happy and productive workforce who enjoy working at your company. When employee needs and goals align with the company’s values and goals they are more likely to enjoy their work.

A good organizational culture can also promote higher employee engagement rates, leading to increased productivity and higher retention.

Some other benefits of a positive culture are:

Greater creativity and innovation
Improved morale
Greater ability to attract top talent
Increased revenue and profit

Overall your company’s culture is crucial to retaining your top talent and keeping your employees happy, healthy, and motivated to achieve company goals.

How to manage organizational culture

When your revenue team is growing quickly it can be difficult to maintain and manage your company’s culture within your new team. As you build your revenue function as a leader, you should consider how you will help your company maintain its positive culture.

Refine and reinforce org vision and values

Onboarding new hires is a great time to introduce company values. So, ensure your company’s values and goals are emphasized, and the employee’s role in achieving those goals is understood during this period.

After a major team growth spurt, you may want to reinforce your org culture to your entire team through a short presentation or handout. This shines a spotlight on culture and emphasizes its importance in your team.

Model good leadership

As a revenue leader, your team will look to you for how to act within the organization. With this in mind, you need to walk the walk and set an example when it comes to culture and leadership.

Greg Larsen, VP of Revenue Operations at Eltropy, highlights how a CEO at a previous company practiced what he preached to create an excellent culture of growth:

“Our CEO would discuss a mistake he made recently, what he learned, and how he'd improve. And suddenly employees felt empowered to take smart risks without the fear of failure.”

Hire for culture fit

Your revenue team is growing quickly, so you might be tempted to hire staff that tick all of the skills boxes, without much further consideration. While you might fill your job openings quickly, this approach will harm your company’s culture in the long run.

Instead, you should hire new team members with culture fit in mind. Hiring by considering how someone’s personality, goals, and aspirations will add to your team (as well as their skillset) will allow you to build a great team to work in.

Set clear goals

When setting wider, strategic business goals, remember to consider the role your team will have in achieving these goals. Having clear, attainable, and measurable goals will help to motivate team members to perform without becoming discouraged.

These goals should also align with the company’s values and goals, allowing your team to understand the importance of their role in achieving business goals.

Provide and gain feedback

A company culture that encourages feedback allows your employees and company to grow and improve. Embrace a culture where feedback is encouraged throughout the year and not just during annual performance reviews.

It’s also helpful to know what your employees think of your organization to help inform your cultural decisions. A great way to do this is by utilizing anonymous surveys to better understand what your employees are looking for.

Empathy and flexibility

Employee well-being should be a huge part of your organization’s culture. Part of this includes having empathy for your team members and offering them support. Your org may also benefit from flexible working policies to better support employee work-life balance.

Foster collaboration

Revenue teams must work cross-functionally to get the job done - so your culture also needs to promote collaboration and teamwork. Offering spaces for brainstorming and conversation as well as regular team-building meetups can help break down silos in your organization and create a happy team.

Learning and development

Encouraging continuous learning within your organization is a great way to boost employee happiness as they can develop new skills and find fulfillment in their work. Plus, this attribute of culture can also benefit your organization as your team members are always improving and refining their skill sets.

This will likely need cultural buy-in from your organization such as an L&D budget and/or L&D days to encourage employees to make use of their upskilling opportunities.

Inclusion

Inclusion and diversity are often used interchangeably, but these are actually different concepts. Inclusion is the feeling of belonging within a culture or environment and will determine how accepted, respected, and valued your employees feel within your company.

You can cultivate a diverse workplace of many types of people. But without inclusion, your employees won’t feel accepted into your workplace culture. That’s why it’s important to ensure inclusion is at the core of your organization’s values.

Challenges for managing organizational culture

Here are some challenges that might arise when trying to manage culture within your growing revenue function.

Lack of ownership and buy-in

Since no one person fully owns organizational culture, it can be difficult to get leaders and employees to rally behind cultural changes. Working with your team to encourage culture shifts and gain feedback is crucial to managing your company’s culture.

This can allow your team to feel more empowered and take responsibility for part of the organization’s culture.

Complacency

Company culture is constantly shifting, so complacency can cause friction across your organization. The way you’ve always done it might be comfortable, but to make progress, your org needs to evolve its culture to meet new employee needs.

Change management strategies may need to be utilized by leaders when larger culture changes occur. However, change isn’t new for revenue leaders. So, ensure you advise the project team on change management best practices.

Swift growth

When growing your team quickly, lots of new hires can lead to your company culture getting lost in the growth. Managing culture through swift growth can be challenging, especially if your company values aren’t emphasized early.

The dynamic between leadership and employees may change as your team grows, and you should be equipped to manage this shift.

Learn more from CROs…

Want to know more about scaling culture alongside your business growth? Check out this article where Benjamin Samuels, Chief Revenue Officer at WeWork, and Jim Pattermann, Chief Revenue Officer at Palmetto Technology Group, discuss rapid growth.