How Growth Stalled at 90 Employees

Case study - Alignment strain stage

MD Frustrated with Management Team's Dependency on Leadership

Do Members of Your Leadership Team:

• Still hold on to parts of previous roles, at expense of their current roles?
• Step in & resolve functional issues without equipping management to resolve them next time?
• Struggle with imagining what future business growth might look like?   

Client Challenge:

Having grown the manufacturing business to 90 employees, the leadership team had recognised the need to create a separate management layer. So, they promoted several team leaders into managers without assessing their ability or interest.

Two years later, they were deeply frustrated that managers failed to resolve operational or team issues independently & they would have to step in. In addition, annual business goals looked exactly the same as prior year’s goals, even with huge market potential.

They never brainstormed, thought blue-sky or innovated. They were way busy with operational detail to do anything about it.

The leadership team was stuck in a rut, frustrated, exhausted and desperate to change the outcome. 

Facilitating an initial workshop, we quickly established that while  leaders wanted managers to take ownership, they were unintentionally teaching them not to. When an issue arose, they would swoop in, sort it out & walk away, without ever stopping to explain or equip managers with the knowledge & skills to resolve it next time. 

We also identified: 

• No strategy or vision for the business
• No recognition of leadership vs management roles or boundaries
• Lack of key management capability 
• All levels were working at 1-2 levels below their pay grade 

Our solution:

Given complexity of change required, interventions, running over a 15-month period, included:

• Worked with leadership & management teams separately & together, to agree expected roles, responsibilities & decision authority of both levels & boundaries between them
• Provided key training & executive coaching to management & leadership teams, to build baseline knowledge & address required mindset shifts
• Detected where change momentum was getting stuck & worked with CEO, to unstick it
• Facilitated 1-2-1 strategy sessions with CEO, to identify future growth opportunities
• Supported CEO in interviewing & selecting a COO

Case Study Outcomes

• Managers managed & resolved operational & people issues
• Teams actively managed & performance issues nipped in bud, instead of festering
• Leadership focus shifted from firefighting to strategy
• Operational capacity doubled, through acquisition of new site & building of new plant
• One executive was facilitated to exit business amicably; successfully replaced with senior leader, 5+ years in role  
• CEO’s time freed up to focus on strategic decisions & overall business performance.
  

“The business was stuck. 

Without addressing our challenges, we were never going to be able to unlock our growth potential”