Business Growth is a Mindset
There’s a vibe in growth companies, a certain attitude that’s easy to pick up the moment you walk through the door. It’s an atmosphere that’s completely absent from companies that are stagnate and stumbling along. Organizations have internal environments that either enable growth or inhibit it.
The choices made in a business reflect the mindsets that exist within the organization. Every day, in companies across the world, people are making choices about how to conduct business. These choices either promote growth or they prevent it.
Growth Mindsets
High-growth companies don’t focus solely on growth. They are also intently focused on creating the right internal environment that will result in growth. Growth companies structure themselves to enable entrepreneurial behaviors.
This is a clear contrast to companies that simply focus on financial metrics and push people to deliver bigger revenue numbers and higher ROI.
Companies with continuous growth build competitive muscle while at the same time; an organizational framework is put in place that guides employees to do the right things every day. Growth results from a set of behaviors. A strong supportive organization creates the right environment to enable and encourage the right behaviors on a consistent basis.
If you want steady growth, then you must make questioning, constructive debate, collaboration, diversity of opinions, willingness to change, listening, trying new ideas, tolerance for mistakes and failures, and learning part of the fabric of your business. And you must enable, measure, and reward behaviors that lead to those things.
The enemies of growth are the status quo, avoiding debate and conflict, group thinking, arrogance, denial, fear of failure, penalizing mistakes, discouraging experimentation, product centricity, ROI, and measurement and reward systems that focus too heavily on short-term outcomes.
Growth companies simply don’t have cultures of “don’t rock the boat,” cultures of “my way or the highway,” cultures of “that’s how we’ve always done it,” cultures of “command and control,” and cultures that don’t value employees and/or customers.
Successful high growth companies focus on creating the right kind of environment to enable and encourage the right behaviors. This results in high employee engagement and execution excellence, which in turn leads to smart strategies, quality products, satisfied customers – and growth.
Does your business have a culture that promotes or prevents the behaviors necessary for growth?
