Built to Grow
A Survival Manual for Growing Companies
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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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
Most people view luck in one of two ways, both at the extreme ends of the spectrum. First, some see luck as the explanation for extraordinary success. These people see big winners as those that beat the odds; they see winning as random chance. The second view is that luck plays no role in success at all. Folks in this camp see skill, preparation, determination, and hard work as the reasons for success. People with this view totally dismiss the role luck played in their success and take every bit of the credit themselves. Read More
My last post discussed the multitude of problems that arise from a lack of candor in organizations. But simply asking people to be more candid without a supporting organizational culture is futile. The concept of candor is simple, but being honest inside of organizations is difficult. It’s hard because you are fighting against human nature and established organizational behaviors. People avoid conflict, engage in groupthink, tell their bosses what they think they want to hear, withhold feedback, hoard information, and ignore reality... Read More
