Culture matters. Our data-driven work over thirty years has shown that it underpins a whole load of positive organisational outcomes. Driving a transformation. Going global. Leveraging M&A. Landing a restructure.
But it has an exponential impact when you’re trying to generate growth. And with fintech as one of the fastest growing and most successful sectors in the UK, Founders, CEOs and CPOs are starting to turn to culture as one of its major challenges. While most fintechs have cracked the growth code, culture is looming as the next big hazard to tackle.
Why is that?
It’s because organisational culture dictates critical issues like execution speed, adaptability, and talent retention. Without an aligned culture, growth strategies can falter in fintechs because the workforce lacks the psychological safety and shared habits needed to take risks, innovate, and move quickly.
So, what really matters?
Across our work with hundreds of clients – including many fast-growth fintech firms – we’ve identified five critical factors related to organisational culture if you want to power growth.
1. Culture needs to be aligned to the growth strategy
Many firms tackle their corporate strategy for growth and their organisational culture separately. They end up in different “boxes”. The Founder or CEO and ExCo take care of the growth strategy. HR writes down some values and thereby “creates” what the corporate culture should look like. This is simply the wrong way to do it.
Organisations we have worked with who have used culture to ignite growth do things differently by asking three simple questions:
- What are we trying to achieve strategically around growth?
- What sort of culture do we need to try and achieve that type/level of growth?
- So, what sort of behaviours do we need to see more and less of in the organisation to create that type of culture
In other words, they are purposeful about aligning the culture they need to achieve their growth ambition. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But we find this happens in the minority of cases, as much in fintech as across all sectors.
2. The culture must be role-modelled from the top
Values written on a wall or on a corporate website rarely matter. For the average employee, they make little difference to their day-to-day work. But all our data evidence shows that employees will align their behaviours with those they see from senior leaders. The CEO and the ExCo set the tone, they define what great looks like and how people should behave too.
Our data shows that employees who feel leaders are living by the key behaviours of the company are four times more likely to replicate those same ways of working. In fintech growth scenarios, that has a huge impact. If leaders are demonstrating speed, flexibility, drive and risk taking, employees are much more likely to follow suit. Equally though, if leaders are not living by the stated behaviours to drive growth, why would they expect employees to do so?
3. Certain elements just have to be embedded in the culture
Using our data, we have isolated a small number of cultural attributes which seem to differentiate high growth cultures:
- Speed: creates momentum, especially in the early stages of growth. It accelerates learning cycles, creates market responsiveness, creates engagement and gets over the risk of hesitation and perfection-seeking
- Innovation: the engine of organisational growth, particularly in fintech. It transforms creative ideas into tangible value, protecting firms from disruption and opening new revenue streams. It ensures an organisation evolves alongside its market. But it requires strong levels of psychological safety to encourage risk taking and challenge, something many companies struggle with
- Customer focus: aligns internal operations with evolving customer / client needs. It drives growth cultures by fuelling sustainable revenue, accelerating innovation, and creating a unified work environment among key talent
- Continuous learning: prioritises skill development and frames failures as critical learning opportunities. It prevents stagnation by encouraging employees to constantly upskill and iterate on processes to enable growth to happen quicker
- Accountability: empowers individuals to own their outcomes, follow through on strategic goals, and course-correct if targets are missed. It ensures the organisation can scale with speed while maintaining high standards
4. Culture must be threaded into KPIs and performance management
Many fintechs we have worked with can do a good job of outlining the culture they want. However, fewer succeed at embedding that culture through every part of the employee lifecycle. For example, we have found that, if the growth culture is not woven into aspects like KPIs or into performance management processes, companies do not scale at the desired speed. Many organisations focus only on the “what” side of performance and not on the “how”. If how people behave is not part of their performance assessment mechanism, you are unlikely to generate the culture you need for optimum growth.
5. The organisation must be intentional about culture
And all of the above needs to be done intentionally. Too many fintech organisations – and especially Founders / CEOs and executive leaders – do not spend enough time actively thinking about what sort of culture they need to achieve their growth ambition. It gets outsourced to HR or, worse, is left to chance: the culture is just left to self-evolve. The strongest growth firms we have worked with are the opposite – they intentionally think about the target culture they want and what behaviours will create it to achieve growth.
Client success story
We worked with a global, market leading fintech specialised in advanced tech-driven infrastructure, multi-asset portfolio analysis tools, risk management software, and data services that power modern global investing over a 14-year period as it evolved its culture twice at different growth stages. The differentiator which helped them achieve this? The Founder / CEO was highly intentional about the culture he felt was needed to drive growth. He also actively involved his full leadership team in envisioning this at both critical evolutions of the culture: what values will help generate growth here now; what behaviours will encourage growth to happen?
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How do you create the growth culture you need?
The first step to creating the culture you need for growth is to define it.
We work with leaders of fintechs to help them discover what their target culture looks like. We find that a helpful starting point is to research an organisation’s competitors: how are they talking about their culture? To what degree do you want to align with this, or challenge this?
As we know, it is critical that culture is aligned to the organisation’s growth strategy. To think about the culture in this context, we get fintech leaders to think through: what does the culture here need to look like to help you achieve your growth strategy? And so, thinking about the current culture at your organisation, what aspects do you want to keep, remove, and add? We’ve found this simple exercise to be very effective at narrowing in on that target culture definition.
Once leaders are aligned on their vision for the target growth culture, we have found it beneficial to open up the discussion to a wider group of people within the organisation for input, to ensure the culture is being co-designed and co-created, not just from the top-down.
A strawman definition for the target culture typically takes the form of a set of values, which shape the organisation’s culture, but, more importantly, a set of behaviours bringing each of these values to life. Once this has been jointly defined by leaders and employees from across the organisation, it is important to gather some baseline insights to assess the current state of play. With the fintechs we have worked with, this has taken the form of a tailored culture assessment. The assessment identifies:
- To what extent employees at the organisation currently see the proposed values being lived day-to-day to give a high-level overview of which of the values resonate most among employees
- To what extent they see the proposed behaviours currently being lived day-to-day at the organisation – this helps us to understand which of the proposed behaviours are most associated with each of the proposed values (our smart analysis identifies the strongest associations)
We also typically ask respondents to choose the top three proposed values seen to drive the organisation’s growth strategy, as well as some tailored employee engagement questions, to identify the values and behaviours most likely to drive organisational outcomes.
Using responses to the culture assessment, our Culture Analytics, plus ongoing conversations with the organisation and its leaders, we together identify the final model – the Culture Blueprint – for the target culture, composed of core values and the behaviours that bring these values to life.
Armed with their target Culture Blueprint, fintechs then need to activate their target culture. When working with fintechs, we design and implement targeted interventions that turn the Culture Blueprint into action and deliver measurable progress against their growth strategy. There are many ways to do this, but our most successful methods include:
- Creating a culture playbook to illustrate how the target culture can be embedded across every stage of the employee journey
- Developing a behavioural framework to support the target culture, setting out the specific behaviours that demonstrate the target values in practice, providing employees with clear guidance on what is expected of them
- Using innovative listening, collaboration and insight tools to actively engage employees in bringing culture to life (such as panel studies, crowdsourcing and AI-powered dynamic “conversations”)
- Developing storytelling approaches that bring the target culture to life, especially during the early phases of culture development, by translating values and behaviours into real examples that employees can relate to, remember and emulate
Monitoring progress on the growth culture and assessing its impact is the critical step to enable fintech firms to continuously refine their approach to ensure sustainable success over time. Developing a 360-feedback approach gathers perspectives from managers, peers, direct reports and other stakeholders on how consistently leaders and managers are demonstrating the desired behaviours. Cultural strengths, gaps and areas where further development or reinforcement is needed can be identified and worked on.
In addition to this, a culture survey tracking approach enables fintechs to monitor progress more widely, measuring employees’ perceptions, experiences and behaviours against defined cultural objectives, identifying areas where the desired culture is taking hold, as well as pockets of resistance or aspects of the employee experience that require further attention. Regular tracking in this way provides a robust evidence base for evaluating the effectiveness of culture initiatives, enabling leaders to make informed adjustments and maintain momentum in their culture transformation journey.
Client success story
We worked with a leading crypto asset management company to create a fresh culture for their newly formed technology start-up to position them for the future and enable high growth. The critical factor which helped them embed the culture was a life-cycle oriented playbook, which the two CO-founders insisted be part of the work. This ensured the culture was instilled at every stage for employees – from recruitment and onboarding through performance management and promotion, reward and recognition approaches and right through to exit and alumni relations.
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A word of warning…
If you want a counterexample on culture and growth, look no further than this fintech which had operated in the payment services sector. The firm had grown around a larger-than-life founder to reach a headcount of 500 with offices around the globe and almost $20Bn in AUM, had become a unicorn fintech and was set for a $7Bn stock market flotation. However, under the surface of the firm, behaviours had emerged which, ultimately led to its downfall. People issues were always seen as way down the list to financial performance. Leaders at the very top of the firm had never been intentional about the culture they wanted to build. Poor behaviours at the top became mirrored all the way down the organisation. The result? The firm fell from grace spectacularly, resulting in insolvency and close to 500 jobs being lost overnight. At its heart, the firm had never been proactive about shaping a culture which could secure long-term growth and success. Neglecting to tackle poor behaviours and permitting the worst corporate excesses allowed a negative and destructive culture to evolve with no checks and balances. Implosion was the inevitable outcome.
Conclusions: using culture to drive growth
So, what does an ideal roadmap look like for fintech firms trying to create a culture for growth? Looking across our many client stories, there are four critical stages:
- Getting aligned: ensure the culture you are trying to generate is in line with your growth objectives as a business.
- Having a clear target, future culture: be intentional by identifying the most pivotal aspects of your culture for growth and agreeing what elements you need to keep, tweak, remove and add versus your current culture.
- Activating it: use a culture playbook or behavioural framework to thread your culture into every part of the employee lifecycle; make leader role-modelling the starting point on behaviours; have consequences for people not living by those behaviours.
- Measuring it: build the culture into your KPIs and performance management systems (look at the “how”, not just the “what”); and get regular employee insights into what is working well and not so well in the culture. Use 360’s on leader and management behaviours; use regular culture audits to assess the organisation-wide move towards the target culture.
Want to find out more?
Download the Target Culture Framework paper to learn more about how this helps clients embed strong cultures that consistently drive success.
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