Every business of whatever size wants growth to be part of its journey. This would mean putting in the necessary efforts and resources to accomplish objectives that have been laid down towards achieving desired growth. Achieving this requires a culture that is coordinated with the diligence with employees having a clear end goal.

Different organizations pursue different growth types i.e., organic growth, strategic growth, internal, partnership, acquisitions, and merger. Regardless of which growth direction is being taken, culture remains to be a key pillar to lean on when walking through the journey. A well-cultivated culture is what successful companies pride themselves on.

A culture that propels growth is heavily dependent on leadership. This goes without saying, organizations must invest heavily in leadership. These leaders should provide an environment where growth is encouraged. In many organizations that haven't seen the light of growth, toxicity is in play. People undermine each other in the name of shinning or for personal reasons, there is a lot of micromanaging, and exploitation of employees to achieve results. In such situations, leaders may have veered off the main road of growth and shifted to performance. With such, fear-based culture is created that leads to protectionism, minimum risk-taking & innovation, a lot of employee burn-out, and turnover with the result being poor performance.

In a Forbes article, Tony Schwartz argues "building a culture focused on performance may not be the best, healthiest, or most sustainable way to fuel results. Instead, it may be more effective to focus on creating a culture of growth" This indicates that culture for growth is important. But what is this culture?

To create a culture that promotes growth, there are key elements worth observing which are a safe environment, manageable experiments, continuous learning, and continuous feedback. In such a culture, employees and leaders interact with each other and everyone is coaching and learning from one another. When leaders focus on the above elements, coupled with inward commitment to provide a consistent example of a growth mindset, people will thrive, and create a sustainable growth culture that leads to far greater innovation, performance, and results than we could ever hope to accomplish by just focusing on performance and results alone.

Leaders should as well lead with a growth mindset that ignites intrinsic motivation from employees that makes them find more meaning in work, engage, and commit to the organization. With this mindset and consistency in modeling the growth approach while working with people, the environment becomes safe for everyone to disclose his/her vulnerabilities. (We are not equal and so we have various weaknesses that should be accommodated in workplaces). As a result, we see limitations and gaps as developmental opportunities, not issues to be avoided.

To achieve growth, there is a need for clarity on vision, good leadership skills, and a well-laid plan to realize the goal. It is possible, it has been done before and it can still be done by the small, medium, and micro businesses, it's not a reserve for the big boys.