When growing your business, organizational design becomes a challenge: finding the right balance between scaling your team and organization to keep up with business flow, while planning for the right mix of talent and skills for the future. When the drumbeat of increasing revenue gets louder, how do you make sure your organization can answer the call?
Do you just hire more, do some restructuring, or should existing employees be asked to take on more? In growing organizations, often teams become overstressed and feel under-resourced. Yet, the desire for growth is intentional, so how do you scale your venture so the right people are in place doing the right things, and the expansion you’re creating will succeed?
Here are eight tips to keep in mind when scaling the talent side of your business:
1. Adopt an accountability framework such as the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) to create clarity and expectation setting, for yourself and your team. To support the framework, consider creating a Success Profile for yourself, or co-owners and key shareholders, especially if the latter are actively involved in the business. It’s essential to articulate what your role really is or should be, as growth demands that founders, owners, and key players make the transition from that of visionary or functional expert to leader. The Success Profile should describe the mandate/mission statement of your position, your core accountabilities and measures of success. Having a vision for your own performance can help you hold yourself accountable as you navigate beyond operational success to achieving the strategic results you desire.
2. Hire the best people you can find to be part of your management team. Until these key players are in place – and it can take years to get the mix right – it will be difficult to transition yourself from the active tactician to the strategist who plays in the bigger picture with a focus on the road ahead. If innovation, strategy and execution drive real scalability and it appears they do, the right management talent is essential. Whether that’s one or two people initially, or four or five, your growth goals won’t be realized without a great team in place.
And, when recruiting new leadership talent, do so with a clear succession mindset, not just to fill a spot on your organizational chart as you envision it today. As described in the first point above, creating a Success Profile for all key players can go a long way to aligning them with the vision, mission and performance metrics for the business.
3. Clearly define what leadership should mean within your organization and publicly and privately point out the places where you see it. Be transparent about your intentions (hopefully you have them!) to create leadership and development opportunities and encourage conversations on the topic.
4. Create a few different leadership streams. A technical expert leadership stream could be one and a sales leadership stream might be another. Have both pathways running parallel, but with crossover for transferable skills. This will enable your organizational design to embed development opportunities for current team members to function beyond their technical/functional roles. This may apply to your key individual contributors as much as it does to those recently promoted into management positions. Encourage them to be part of the conversations on strategy and seek their input whenever you can. Aligning that experience with leadership activities is essential to developing their capabilities to add more value.
5. As your business grows, the success of upskilling or reskilling lies in being intentional about providing assignments, projects, or real business challenges that will offer your most talented individual contributors and emerging leaders alike the chance to stretch themselves. Formal skills development training is essential where dramatic shifts in skills are required. Dedicate the time to debrief the successes and the struggles.
6. Push decision making further and deeper to get quicker and better decisions. Team members who are close to the front line with your customers can have the best handle on the right course of action; the more you can trust them to make decisions, the more value they add, and the less that’s on your plate. Decision points with clear lines of authority are essential for your business to function optimally and make for optimal organizational design.
7. Know your corporate values or do a refresh of these if you haven’t done so in awhile. They are the anchors that represent the behaviors and beliefs that underline the work your people do and how they interact with your customer base and each other. Scaling your business may require a revisit of these values, as certain behaviors may become more important over time. Above all, in a rapidly growing environment, corporate values offer direction to individuals when situations require judgment calls, regardless of the situation they face.
8. Ensure cross-functional collaboration remains strong. The strength of many a growing business is the cross-functional input, perspectives, and skills that people contribute as part of the daily work experience. While specialization becomes necessary as the organization grows, ensuring those conversations continue will support business agility and flexibility as new challenges arise.
Scaling a small business or entrepreneurial venture is a major shift where teams are created and hand-offs to various groups begin. Your organizational design and corporate structure may need to reshape intentionally to provide focus to communication pathways and decision points, bringing order to chaos in the face of fast organic growth. It’s better to create the structure and expectations you need before teams become too complex and the ways you work stand in the way of your continued success.
Learn more about how great organizational design can make the difference in scaling your business growth. Explore the Align. Grow. Prosper. Course.
