I wrote this for Influence & Co.’s client, Acceleration Partners. It appears on Business.com.

Culture exists in every company, either by default or by design. And designing a positive culture, by default, is difficult. In many cases, companies inadvertently plant toxic elements of culture during startup that need to be weeded out as the company grows. What you need as a sapling of a company is not necessarily what you need as you grow into a mighty oak. You must adapt to your environment, bending to the sunlight, or you are doomed to fail

Your sapling’s essential nutrients — your employees — will hitchhike elsewhere if they feel your company’s culture is unsatisfying. Workplace stress is associated with a figure of 50 percent in voluntary turnover. And the high costs of recruiting, training, and expertise can’t be ignored. In addition to lowering productivity of your whole team, replacing even one employee can cost about a fifth of that employee’s salary. With figures like those, it becomes obvious why weeding out bad culture is essential as your company grows.

5 weeds preventing your company from success

Toxic work environments are like Roundup to a company’s growth. They lead to high turnover, instability, cliques, miscommunication, and stifled innovation, because people are afraid to share their ideas freely or collaborate with their coworkers. Here are 5 bad behaviors to nip in the bud before they nip you.

1. Glorifying the firefighters. A forest fire will stop your sapling’s growth in its tracks. It can therefore be tempting to reward your employees for putting out fires.—reactionary, behavior, if you will. But as your company plants its roots, you want to reward people who cut down the surrounding trees before the burn.

2. Rewarding the utility player. Early on, it’s beneficial for your team to be flexible and wear many hats. As you grow, however, you need all stars who support the varying branches of your company. You want all-stars whose roles have clear KPI’s and do a couple things really well. When dual roles are no longer needed, you might have to make the hard decision to cut the thorns — people unwilling to commit to a single objective.

3. Problem-identifying instead of solution-finding. Too often, teams dissect problems, instead of identifying solutions. Like any type of gardening, actually weeding out problems takes time. Gino Wickman says it best in his book, “Traction”: “When addressing issues, leadership teams spend most of their time discussing the heck out of everything, rarely identifying anything and hardly ever solving something. It’s truly an epidemic within the business world.”

4. Lauding 12 hour days. In the early days of any startup, blood, sweat, and tears are treated as currency. As you grow, however, you should become focused on outcomes. Nip the excuse, “I don’t have enough time” in the bud. We all know the work martyr who checks their phone on the beach. What you might not know is that only 75 percent of those work-from-vacation types reported receiving a bonus within the last three years, while 81 percent of the general work population reported getting one. It’s not about time spent, it’s about goals reached.

5. Focusing on individual achievement. No matter how many tasks you check off, your company will be pushing daisies if those tasks were, in the grand scheme of things, unimportant. Beyond being unhelpful, people perceive those who humble brag as “more irritating and less likable.” Promoting bragging definitely isn’t a recipe for healthy growth.

5 Techniques to Nip Bad Culture in the Bud

Gardening is about more than identifying the weeds — you need the trowels and shovels with which to remove them. It’s the same with culture: once you identify elements of toxic culture, you must figure out how to weed them out. Here are 5 techniques you can use to plant positive culture.

1. Bend towards the sunlight. Be self-aware as you weed out elements of bad culture. This is the hardest lesson to learn — the people who propped you up in the early stages of growth might block the sunlight as you continue to grow. Sometimes, you might have to move on from long-term employees as you enter a new lifecycle.
2. Create core values. These outline what behaviors and characteristics your company values and wants to foster. Core values are the most common way of establishing and defining culture. My one caveat is to make sure your values actually represent your company — Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, observed his company for a whole year before establishing the ten values Zappos still uses today.

3. Make explicit what was implicit. Outline how you do (and don’t) do things within your company. The earlier you can do this, the better. In our company, we rolled out our 12 AP Way operating principles, in conjunction with our updated core values. Fight problems with facts and be specific. This take emotion out of the conversation, and allow you to begin a dialogue with your company based on actionable steps and solutions.

4. Align rewards with desired behaviors. The easiest way to plant positive cultural change is reward the behaviors you are trying to cultivate. People will take notice and start behaving that way. If you want people to begin taking time off seriously, reward those who put their phones away on the beach. 88 percent of human resources managers say this technique of value-based recognition helps to create positive change based on corporate values.

5. Sow the seeds of cultural change. Hire only those who can help cultivate the cultural changes you are trying to make. Hiring someone who constitutes a poor culture fit can cost your company more than half of that person’s salary. Be thoughtful bout who you hire.

Cultural changes are, by default, hard to execute. If, however, you are clear and consistent with your in planting the above seeds of change, your company will be coming up daisies.