E61: Maintaining Culture During Periods of Growth with Obsess’s Adam Hill

Maintaining Culture During Periods of Growth with Obsess’s Adam Hill
This episode, I’m joined by the VP of People at Obsess Adam Hill to discuss the challenges growth brings to startups, how the size of a company affects its culture, and how startups can keep their culture intact during periods of rapid growth.

• The benefits of working with startups.
• How operation experience translates to working with people.
• The most rewarding aspects of working in HR.
• The challenge growth brings to startups.
• What it’s like when a company triples in size.
• How to keep your culture intact when going through periods of rapid growth.
• How to protect employees from burnout.
• How the size of a company affects its culture.

• Obsess
• StaffGeek

• LinkedIn

• Lindsay Patton on LinkedIn
• Lindsay Patton by Email

Quotables:

• 15:36 “It’s easy to recruit and to hire and grow in that way, I think it’s harder to do that and still maintain the company culture you want. It’s easy to bring in a bad candidate but it’s a lot harder to make sure you’re doing the process in the right way and conscious of this person is going to be the right fit for the company for the long term, not just a person to fill a seat tomorrow because we need somebody.”
• 22:00 “The smaller the company the more culture is impacted by each individual so if you’re a team of twenty and you hire somebody who has a really negative impact on culture that’s felt across the whole team. So you really need to pay attention early on to both the impact of an individual on a company culture but then also the things you’re trying to instil on company culture and those cultural norms or core values are pretty flexible at that stage, as you grow it becomes harder to change culture.”