Stage 6’s gates of focus are People, Profit, and Process.
Maintaining a healthy company culture is important with the number of people between 96 to 160, making People the top priority. A big part of an organization’s success of this size is the ability to successfully assimilate new people so they are engaged and effective at their assigned roles. By this stage, the company must be growing a Leadership Team that can take over responsibility of the day-to-day activities of the business from the CEO. The gap between the CEO and incoming employees has never been wider, which is why it’s so important for the layers of leadership to be acting together as a cohesive unit.
Profit is second priority to ensure the company continues to produce the high levels of profitability required at this new level of complexity. The ability to generate profitable revenue should be less difficult than in prior Stages, since it is built upon a Business Development engine that is running like a well-oiled machine.
While Process cannot be ignored, it remains third priority for this Stage. Process was the primary Gate in Stage 4; if an organization neglected to invest in Process at that time, it can face severe scalability issues in Stage 6.
Business leaders embracing these Gates of Focus should be constantly thinking about how decisions will impact employees. Their energy should be focused on the development and well-being of their team.
Gates of Focus Misalignment
An engineering firm that is led by a very Process-focused CEO has grown to Stage 6. A civil engineer by trade, the CEO excels at his craft and has successfully built a business but tends not to focus much on his employees. Currently, his primary focus is on Profit. In order to meet the demand for the company’s services while keeping costs low, he decides to hire offshore engineers. By doing so, the company saves money on labor as well as overhead expenses such as office space.
Working remotely, the new team members are not introduced to the company culture in a systematic way. The engineers in the office notice a difference in the quality standards of the new team members. Work is not being completed in a way that supports their premium brand. An “us versus them” mentality begins to develop between the on-site employees and the offshore workers. Concerned that their jobs are at stake, the engineers in the home office start hoarding information, contributing to a further decline in overall quality.
The CEO has failed to calculate the true costs involved with hiring offshore engineers. The arrangement works well on paper and initially supports the company’s bottom line, but the toll taken in terms of employee morale, culture, and quality of work will undermine the company’s long-term success. In order for the company to continue to offer the same quality of work in support of a strong, cohesive brand, the new employees must be trained and incentivized in a consistent manner across the board.
The concepts from this article were taken from The Strategic Stage: Organizational ReWilding Rules for Business Growth. Available through The ReWild Group and Amazon, the book explores this and other concepts in-depth while providing illustrations to help business leaders incorporate the ideas into their organizations. Get your copy today to learn the rules for growth for companies with 96-160 employees.