Scale Architects
Powered by Predictable Success
As a business consultant and coach, some of the most powerful and transformational moments I've experienced have been the simple act of telling a business leader or executive team something that they already know. Reflecting on this made me ask why we so often know the right thing, but fail to do it.
Where does growth come from, incremental gains, or quantum leaps? There are so many articles written on this question, and they come to virtually every single conclusion. I'd like to take a moment to try to explain why the answer is "YES" and what that means for your business.
Your culture isn't the words on your walls, t-shirts, and website. It is those things that you do as a company that works and is therefore promoted, encouraged, repeated, and honored. Let me pick on integrity to illustrate my point as many, many businesses will include integrity in their core values.
Your business culture isn't a fixed set of values you scribbled with your mission statement on a napkin one night. Instead, it is a dynamic set of hierarchical values that can and should change in response to the business' growth and development.
It's time for the single most significant cultural change your business will experience, stage 3 of the Predictable Success model. Culture in Whitewater. To be honest, I cringed when I wrote the heading "Culture in Whitewater." Culture in Whitewater can be summed up in one word: awful.
Every successful company's true values are almost virtually identical. These shared values actually define employee behavior and have more to do with their stage of development than they do their unique identity and how this is ok.
The culture that has given you so much success and brought you so far will, at some point, prevent you from taking your company to the next level. There is an interesting pattern that happens in virtually every successful startup, regardless of their industry.
I always get curious when a business owner tells me their website doesn't really do anything for them. They usually tell me its because their clients aren't using their website and don't need it. However, I don't think that's what is actually going on.
In the very beginning, your leadership team is you. Then the business grows, you hire some staff, and in a way, your whole staff feels like your leadership team. Then things get difficult.
One of the most important transitions that happens within an organization to allow it to scale rapidly is the transition from anecdotal data to analytical data when making decisions. There is a fantastic parallel in how pilots navigate the skies.
Most companies waste an enormous amount of time by either have too many meetings, too few meetings, or just plain lousy meetings. It doesn't have to be this way.
How fast do you want to grow your business? As your business progresses through each stage of growth, you will need to strategically decide whether you are willing to make the changes necessary to keep growing.
