Startups are future companies. For sustainable growth, make sure your startup operations and organizational structure can grow into your future vision.

In any startup, there are 3 elements in startup operations that contribute to growth: company culture, people versus processes, and leadership.

Startup operations – Company culture

The culture of your company is it’s “personality”. So if you want your toy manufacturing startup to be the epitome of fun, your culture needs to be fun. Embrace fun in your meetings, business cards and perhaps even the clothes your employees wear. Most importantly, make sure the people within your organization are having fun.

In a startup, you have the opportunity to create and shape your future company’s culture. Start off the process by identifying the values that are important to you and are relevant to your product. Afterward, take those values and find ways to integrate them into operations. Most importantly, work on your culture from the inside out.

Startup operations – People and processes

The way you define your culture impacts operations. If you explicitly state the rules of your company, you create a low-context culture. In contrast, workplaces where the culture is transmitted through contextual clues – like body language, status, behavior, etc. – have high-context cultures.

In the latter, people use emotions over facts to complete tasks. They perform with processes as the heart of all actions. On the other hand, low-context cultures are process focused, relying on facts instead of emotions. They need validation in tasks and center the customer in all operations.

Whether you want your startup operations to be process focused or people focused depends on the cultural context. Therefore, be aware of how you communicate cultural elements as it influences operations.

Startup operations – Leadership

High context cultures with an emphasis on people-focused operations favor collectivism. As a result, leaders in such startups seek validation from colleagues, friends, and mentors.

Conversely, startups with low context cultures favor individualism. Their leaders make decisions at their own discretion and rely on their own knowledge, experience, and instinct to guide them.