Is your "good culture" holding you back?
I've watched hundreds of hours of cooking shows and seen some ingredients cooked so many different times and in different ways they're almost a cliché. One ingredient that stands out, especially to a non-southerner like me, is okra.
Chefs say, "It's so delicious! ...Except for the slime."
Judges echo this, praising the fried crunch as the great slime-hider. This isn’t the best endorsement for okra. Especially when a green bean can be crispy and slime-free and provide all the moral high ground that eating fried green vegetables provides.
Why bring this up? Organizations are like okra—your organization is like okra—and leaders, like chefs, have a remarkable ability to overlook the "slime."
What is “The Slime”?
The slime is the cultural goo hindering your venture's potential. It's a mix of egos, outdated practices, and false assumptions stunting growth despite your best efforts. While you are digging through marketing KPIs and sales metrics, the slime is gunking up the gears of your best-laid plans.
In any organization, culture is both the problem and the solution.
With the right approach, culture can be delightful, but without high heat and grease, it remains a slimy mess.
Long-term leaders often become blind to this slime, much like Southerners with their okra. Here’s how to spot it in your venture:
1. Assume You're Part of the Problem.
The longer you lead, the more likely you are to contribute to stagnation. It’s not intentional. It just gets harder and harder to be objective about long-term aspects of your business. Just like you no longer notice a creaky floorboard after living in a house for so long, we become deaf to the issues because the organization mirrors the leader. We humans are notoriously bad at recognizing ourselves.
2. Recognize Scale Problems.
What worked at $3M may fail at $10M and cause chaos at $50M. Leadership style, organizational structure, and decision-making processes must scale with growth. A sea of ink has been spent on scaling operations, but almost none on scaling culture. The culture you loved with 50 employees will be toxic at 250.
3. Examine Your Decision Engine.
Every venture has default decision-making processes. Who has autonomy, what conflicts recur, how ties are broken, and even your meeting cadence define what decisions work and what ones don't. Culture is made of the self-sustaining rhythm of decisions: how they get made, by whom, how the get communicated, and then measured.
4. Check Incentives.
When my team is managing culture change, we always ask, “Who benefits if this change fails?” This isn’t about judging your team but understanding incentives. Every change disadvantages someone. Long-term leaders have complex incentives, and the longer people have worked for you, the more you need to understand their motivations. In all likelihood, you have long-term leaders and systems that are out of alignment with your growth because you don't understand their incentives the way you once did.
5. Define a Sharp Future State.
In business, the answer to every question is “it depends.” Leaders often use this to commit only to vague future notions, fearing public changes of mind. Learn to change your mind publicly; it teaches your team how to do it well. Without a defined future state, growth efforts become disorganized and ineffective.
6. Get a Clean Audit.
Over the past three years, I've developed a low-cost, high-impact Growth Check to reveal cultural resistance—the real stuff that stagnates growth. This tool offers a clear, end-to-end view of where growth is getting stuck, provides actionable feedback from your entire organization. Beta testing feedback has been remarkable. We've condensed down the signals and signs gleaned from $250k-$500k engagements and made them accessible to you.
My team can book only three more audits before Labor Day. Yours should be one of them.
If you've followed this newsletter and appreciated CultureCraft's insights but weren't sure where to start, this is for you.
Getting Beyond Marketing
I've spent much of this year writing about the slow decline of the social web and its marketing apparatus. As the "digital marketing" promise fades from prominence, organizations that depend on trust and reputation are left with limited options for growth.
Many of you are asking where to pivot to.
The answer is not in a tactic. It's actually not in marketing at all. It's building a self-sustaining growth culture.
How to extract the slime. How to stop burning money on marketing and sales spaghetti and instead align the incentives of your entire org toward its most important goals.
Marketing tactics will continue to distract from what's keeping growth at bay. There are tactics and tools that can be useful, and they can make your growth engine purr, but first, that engine has to be built for growth. But not just any growth: one that is uniquely yours. For this season in your venture and in your leadership.
Remember that Culture makes us and unmakes us. And the longer you lead in an organization, the harder it is to recognize the difference.
If you have questions about what this means for you, I'd love to catch some time together.