As your firm grows, this person ensures you will maintain your core competencies, values, and environment with your newly added team members.
Your firm is growing. Are your brand and culture keeping up? Growth involves more than filling existing seats within your geography. It requires maintaining who you are as a firm while investing in your teams and giving them the autonomy to transfer your culture to new offices, geographies, and client bases. One effective way of doing so is to identify and enlist a culture transplant.
Culture transplant; noun. A culture transplant can be defined as:
- A person who knows how and why a firm ticks and can easily share the how and why to others.
- A person who inherently unifies people into teams – whether in day-to-day business or over a coffee.
Why a culture transplant? Opening new office locations, mergers, and acquisitions are obvious strategic ways to grow your business. Are you maintaining your core competencies, values, and environment with your newly added team members? Understanding the culture of the other firm before you join forces is critical. Both firms must have a tight grasp on culture to blend the good of each group and synchronize all employees.
Merging without transferring your culture will result in backtracking, picking up the pieces and starting over with team integration, or, even worse, a siloed office that does not represent the firm. People who are not integrated into the firm, ultimately, make a less profitable team and result in lost revenue. A culture transplant combats this and positively affects your profitability by ensuring new team members are situated for success, allowing them to focus on projects and clients. In fact, Forbes reports that companies with strong culture have seen a fourfold increase in revenue growth.
The impact of a culture transplant. If you strategize correctly and select the right ambassador of your firm and brand, you will expand into new geographies or office locations and build a team that represents your core values. With a solid team that operates as one and conducts business using proven business methodologies, you will have a better and more profitable team – a win-win.
Whether planting a new flag or blending two firms together, maintaining your culture and its impact on operations is essential. If culture is not the priority, your teams are in jeopardy of becoming misaligned and siloed. Simply put, this is bad for business.
Identifying the ideal representative of your firm and incentivizing them to relocate as a firm ambassador is one way to maintain culture. The right people will organically set the pace for how you do business, interact with clients, and elevate the employee experience.
Characteristics of a culture transplant. Step one is knowing how to identify a culture transplant candidate, because not everyone is qualified. Culture transplant candidates must be able to naturally establish relationships, understand the firm operations and business model, and be committed to growing a team aligned with your firm. Here are things to consider when identifying a culture transplant:
- Are they a strategic risk taker?
- Do others consider them to be a champion of your firm?
- Are they looking for an adventure and a challenge for their next stage of life?
- Do they efficiently influence and earn the trust of others?
- Are they open to professional growth in an unconventional way?
- Do they do their job well?
- Can they serve a specific practice group or market of interest in the new location?
- Do they understand the firm’s business model and operations?
- Are they self-motivated?
Takeaways.
- Your people represent your brand. It is important that new team members understand your brand – culture transplants ensure they do.
- Not all employees make good culture transplants. Identifying who fits the criteria is essential.
- In addition to contributing to low turnover, culture transplants grow the team. They ensure that new offices feel like they belong in the firm.
- Culture transplants set the precedent for how your firm operates. Do you want new employees to be efficient and productive quickly? A culture transplant is an effective way to set pace and expectations for new employees.
Fostering growth and culture over Teams doesn’t cut it. Invest in culture transplants to tap into growth and create opportunities for others along the way.
David Doxtad, P.E. is the president of ISG. Connect with him on LinkedIn. Andy Brandel, P.E. is the executive vice president at ISG, a nationally recognized architecture, engineering, environmental, and planning firm. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
