I've been speaking to founders recently about how culture and ways of working scale... When you're 10, 50, or even 100 people, your values often emerge naturally. You hire people who "get it," and culture feels obvious.
But at 200 people? 500? The room isn't a room anymore. The people who built the early culture are now managing managers. New team members are joining from different industries, geographies, life stages.
And it's impossible to ignore... the world keeps changing around us.
Companies treat their operating principles like artifacts even through significant change. Something they defined once, printed on posters, maybe even embedded in performance reviews. But I find that it is overlooked (or even painful!) to stop and ask: Do these still mean what we need them to mean?
The best People teams (and management teams) I work with revisit operating principles every ~24 months, especially during growth phases. Not to completely overhaul them, but to ask:
Are these still true to how we actually work?
Do they help us make hard decisions, or have they become wallpaper?
Do they reflect who we're becoming, not just who we were?
Your operating principles should be working documents. Living, breathing guides that help people navigate the messy, real decisions that come with scaling.
I'm interested, though, in what makes this process painful, and how you can roll out these changes without disrupting those who joined in the early days. Whereby has recently refreshed their much-loved values (https://whereby.com/blog/our-new-company-values-a-shared-compass-for-the-future/) ... I'm interested in who else out there has done this recently, what was your process? How did it land?