Elevate Your Business Performance

Companies with 20-40 employees are very much founder-driven, which means: 

• Most (all?) decisions get routed passed their desk 
• Everyone is very busy but..
• Hiring more people doesn't seem to increase capacity
• Roles and responsibilities need clarity and consistency
• Processes often in people's heads
• Many original employees wondering if its time for them to leave

Your Business Needs

• Strategy:  Clear articulation of your business model & vision to new staff.  May require updating, to ensure its still relevant 
• Structure:  The need to de-risk the impact of key early-start members deciding to leave & take all their knowledge with them becomes important.  Policies, procedures & processes within each team need to be mapped, improved and documented. 
• Culture:  Culture needs to shift from "getting stuff done" to "the relevant team getting their stuff done"; people need to be effectively on-boarded & developed, so you get the return on your investment in hiring them.  Communication needs consistency.
• Capability:  Each team needs a team lead, to support you and the team.  Investment in developing suitable internal people & developing key team-leadership skills needs to happen.  
  

How Can Evolution Consulting Support You with this Growth Stage?

Typical interventions to support this growth stage include:

• Strategy: Conduct Business Model review and revise Vision and Business Plan.  Develop 2-3 year Strategic Plan.  
• Structure:  Process mapping workshops & documentation. 
• Culture: Identify current culture dynamics & what tweaks are required.  Identify meeting type needs & build meeting discipline
• Capability: Support team lead recruitment & development.
  

Organisation design and processes are much more powerful than us humans ever give them credit for. Your organisation design and processes influence how work is done across your business and yet you might never have given them much thought. Regardless of business size, a lot of pain arises from poorly designed processes and/or poorly designed organisations.

It’s not intentional, of course. Much of the pain arises from your business success. As sales increased, so did operations, so did administration, so the need for more functions, systems, processes. If you’re like most businesses, it was reactive and met an immediate need but over time, as success further increases the business, your business outgrows the organisation design and processes.

How can your business adapt its structure for sustainable growth?

At this point, you have two options: let someone put lots of sticky plasters on it, until you’re suffocating in the pain of sticky plasters; or intentionally design the organisation and processes, so that they actively support your business growth. Hhhmmm, pain or support, which to choose?

If you suspect your business success has resulted in outgrowing organisation design and processes, be they functional, cross-functional, or organisational (e.g., finance, HR, etc), let’s talk and explore what your issues are.

“Culture eats Strategy for breakfast.”

So says Peter Drucker and, most likely, so do many a leader or business owner trying to bring in a new strategy. Having a strategy isn’t enough. Understanding the type of culture required to succeed in delivering the strategy also needs to be considered. A great example of this is a company that builds a strategy on becoming more agile while the current culture is one of “blame”. In this case, culture is both unhelpful and acting as a limiting factor. Until the culture of blame is removed, nobody is going to quickly make a decision and pivot on anything.

Where does organisational culture come from?

It comes from the top i.e., the leadership team, c-suite, management team, whatever you call it. If you want to change culture, you need to change the mindsets, the behaviours and, most likely, the rewards of those at the top. Much easier to write than to achieve.

You might be asking: Is that possible?

As an accredited master of change, Irial has a track record of helping leadership teams change their culture. So, yes, it is possible IF the will and desire is there. 

If you suspect your culture is impeding business success, let’s discuss how Evolution Consulting can help you increase your business performance.

You have the strategy and roadmap, your organisation and processes are designed to align to your business needs, and you have an enabling culture. All systems are go, right? In true consultant speak, it depends.

The fourth building block of business success is whether your people have the capabilities to operate your business system. Do your leaders have the ability to inspire your people? Do your managers have the skill sets to manage and develop people, to get the best performance? Do the different levels of management understand the skill sets and boundaries between one level of management and the next?

Even with a brilliant organisation design, promoting people who are poorly equipped to operate in their new roles is a sure-fire way to destroy it.

How can your business develop new management talent?

Management is a bit of a black box. The activities of management are so wide and varied, that people newly promoted are often unsure what to do. Management processes aren’t as clearly defined as functional processes. In the absence of knowing exactly what do to with their time, many managers will take some of the tangible tasks of their old job up into their new job.

Yep, in one fell swoop, a promotion has just destroyed your beautiful organisation design. To prevent this happening (or paying over the odds for a task to be completed), targeted management and leadership development programmes are key.

If you suspect there’s a misalignment between your organisation design, processes and capability, and its impacting business performance, let’s talk. Evolution Consulting can design and deliver capability-building development programmes.