Category Archives: Management

In business, problems are inevitable. No company ever sails smoothly to success. But the faster a business grows, the more it seems as though there is only enough time to find a quick fix for every problem that comes up. When an organization is moving fast and dealing with a daily crush of activity and firefighting, it’s sometimes difficult to slow down and address issues that are critical but don’t seem particularly urgent.

Having the wrong person in the wrong job is one of the most costly and time-consuming mistakes a business can make. Yet this major business blunder is committed over and over again. Just one weak person in a key position can drag down the performance of the entire organization.

As a company gets bigger, communication both within and between departments suffers. Ultimately, no one knows what’s going on in other parts of the company. And what was once a well-oiled, integrated machine becomes a company in chaos.

Effective managers are the single most important factor in engaging employees, motivating employees, and building a productive workplace. Yet the lack of managerial depth is a serious problem for growing organizations. A firm’s ability to grow is directly related to its ability to add managerial capacity to support its growth.

The bigger a company gets, and the faster it’s growing, the harder it is to get everybody on the same page. The issue is that there probably isn’t an easily understood page to get everyone on. In all likelihood there are many pages, actual and mental, together with meeting notes and emails, each intended to explain the vision, mission, and strategy of your business. Furthermore, most of these messages are full of unclear or even conflicting statements concerning who your company is, what it does, and how it does it.

Understanding roles and responsibilities is pretty clear in a small organization. But as a company gets bigger, things that were understood as a matter of course must be made explicit. Everyone in an organization needs to know who is responsible for what and who has the authority for what. Unclear responsibility is one of the most common pitfalls in a growing business. Show me a rapidly growing organization and I'll show you managers with misaligned goals and vague responsibility.

Making and executing decisions is much harder in a complex organization than it is in a simple one. When companies are small, decisions are made quickly, usually informally, by a small number of people, and they are easily understood. The results are generally apparent and when a decision doesn’t produce the anticipated result, changes are made until the desired outcome is produced. As a result, small companies are typically lean and agile, and they give customers what they want.

High-growth companies are particularly prone to fire fighting. People rush from crisis to crisis; not ending one before another pops up. Real problem solving is replaced with Band Aids. Productivity slides. Managing becomes a constant juggling act of deciding where to assign overworked people and which developing crisis can be ignored until tomorrow.

When a company is young and beginning to grow it’s simple – it’s “us versus the world.” Then the company gets bigger, more people and layers are added, the shared culture gets diluted, and the tendency shifts toward internal competition, political infighting, and aggressive protection of self-interests. It’s a theme that appears in all growing organizations, and smart leaders recognize that "us versus them" behavior will ultimately destroy a company.

Growing companies tend to be full of uncertainty and ambiguity caused by constantly changing employees, job demands, structures, systems, products, and markets. Uncertainty can and does create problems.