If Team and Culture Matter Most for startup success, then what do founders need to know about creating great cultures that will continue to be great?
As an advisor to many founders -- from early-stage startups to late-stage multi-billion$ companies -- I have seen a pattern emerge. This pattern becomes very clear when founders start talking about how to preserve a particular culture when change starts to stress the organization.
The changes that stress the culture and pose new problems for founders include:
Fast scaling or growth, and the need for founders to lead differently
A merger or acquisition, and founders face the need to explain to their organization how the culture is going to change as a result
A change in leadership - either forced or voluntary - and founders need to preserve what made the organization successful
Under each one of these stress points, founders often face needing to transition from a mode of Charismatic Culture to Rational Culture.
Charismatic Culture is a model by which the organization’s culture is embodied and maintained by the founder, who has both the moral authority and the positional authority to define the principles, behaviors, and mechanisms of the organization.
Rational Culture is a model by which the principles, behaviors, and mechanisms are developed as a self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing system, so that it does not rely on any one individual to continue to function. In Rational Cultures, moral and positional authority is split.
The CEO, who occupies the position of the leader... to read the rest of the original article click here