Marcia's Leadership Q and As: The Impact of Scaling Fast

Q. Our company is growing fast, but it seems out of control. Is fast growth good?

A. When a company is innovating or meeting customers’ rapid demands, it may be growing “out of control.” Exponential growth, especially when a management team has not experienced a high rate of growth in the past can be challenging. However, the role of the leaders is to continually have better control of their business and to build a healthy workplace. 

When the customers are demanding, it is imperative that the executives optimize their communication. More now than ever before, the decisions they make impact the business. 

To scale effectively and prevent the organization from imploding with complexity and chaos, it’s important to identify the most critical steps for growth. First, create a solid foundation of management. All the leaders need to understand the direction of the organization and be able to communicate it to all the teams. 

Second, create interactive and interdependent systems across the organization so people can work effectively. Teams can create the processes and projects to contribute the progress for the company. 

Third, anticipating the current and future needs of the customers and linking those to the systems is essential. For the future weeks, months, and years, how will you plan, implement your plan and pivot as necessary? What resources, facilities, budget, skills, and knowledge will you need? How will you review and manage your growth? How will you adapt as your revenues and profits vary (they will)? 

Fourth, as your organization grows, developing a healthy culture is the only way to be sustainable. If the metrics are all about the bottom line and numbers, both your internal and external customers will exit the business over time. While sales and profits are important measures, the highest “metrics” are those that can’t be measured. 

For a healthy, sustainable organization, leadership, communication, teamwork, trust, collaboration, shared vision, a learning organization, quality, kindness are some of the ultimate values and “measures” that can’t and don’t need to be quantitatively measured. 

Extra insights: Individual performance measures, performance management and “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” are sadly management fads and “best practices” that cause thousands and millions of dollars of waste and complexity in organizations? Can you imagine decreasing the waste in your business by 50 to 80%? It’s possible. To understand how, contact me.