The Stages of Growth clarifies the optimal number of managers and leaders for a business. This blog post shows what that ideal number looks like across the seven Stages of Growth. This framework serves as the ideal for businesses to follow, with the management and leadership teams growing in proportion to the needs of the organization. In reality, however, many leaders miss these transitions.
The Position Role Sheet is a management tool that organizes the work through Positions, Roles, and Types of Work. It is a fundamental way to accomplish the goal of first organizing the work before organizing the people doing the work. As a building block for departments of all sizes, Position Role Sheets break down the roles and responsibilities of each position within a department.
This natural tendency to focus on the immediate needs of one’s department can work against the success of the enterprise. Due to daily challenges, needs, and opportunities, departments can become self-focused and lose sight of the big picture. The outcomes of this silo mentality are a lack of cooperation and hoarding of information. What works for one department might make things difficult for another. Departments begin to compete for resources without understanding or even caring about the needs of the enterprise.
Dr. W. Edward Deming is recognized as the father of the modern Quality Movement that ignited new ideas and focused energy on process improvement. He contributed to Japan’s economic recovery after World War II, largely through his influence over manufacturing processes.
Dr. Deming was a champion of systems and processes. At one point, he made this poignant statement: “If you cannot define what you are doing as a process, you do not understand what you are doing.”
Many business owners are familiar with the concept of peer groups—regularly scheduled meetings with other CEOs or business leaders to share perspectives, get new insights, and learn tips and strategies that will help their business thrive.
While there are a lot of positives to this type of experience, we’ve also found there to be some negatives.
The Stage 7 leader is tasked with reigniting the entrepreneurial spirit that characterized the organization in earlier Stages. They achieve this through creating a compelling vision, one that is shared amongst the Leadership Team and clearly communicated to the entire organization. In contrast to the previous Stage, where the leader guided the Leadership Team in creating the vision for the future, the leader is now collaborating with the Leadership Team to create that vision.
We recently posted about a manager’s role as both Coach and Supervisor. Today, we’re going to delve into the topic of problem solving, a task consistently required of every manager.
Regardless of the industry or area of focus, managers are responsible for the output of their team and serve as a resource when obstacles arise. Although not every manager is naturally a good problem solver, there are techniques that can be learned to improve anyone’s problem-solving skills.
Organizational ReWilding is based on the concept of rewilding in nature, a process that occurs when a missing element is reintroduced into an ecosystem. While there are many useful parallels between the two systems, there is a fundamental difference between them: biological ecosystems come about naturally without human intervention, whereas businesses are consciously created.
The process of starting a business requires someone with vision, imagination, and a high level of risk tolerance; businesses do not spontaneously appear. The owner is concerned about all aspects of the business, including profit, cash flow, competition, employees, and cost control (among others).
The Stages of Growth clarifies the optimal number of managers and leaders for a business. This blog post shows what that ideal number looks like across the seven Stages of Growth. This framework serves as the ideal for businesses to follow, with the management and leadership teams growing in proportion to the needs of the organization. In reality, however, many leaders miss these transitions.
In Stage 3, the leader ideally spends 10 percent of their time and energy wearing the Visionary Face, 60 percent wearing the Manager Face, and 30 percent wearing the Specialist Face. Stage 3 is dominated by managing work and people. Since the number of people in the organization has tripled from just two Stages ago, the Manager Face consumes the majority of the leader’s energy. For the first time in the Stages of Growth, the number of people in the organization exceeds the leader’s span of control. This new dynamic drives the need for the leader to delegate work they used to perform themselves.
Stage 7’s Gates of Focus are People, Process, then Profit. The number of employees in a Stage 7 company is double or triple what the company had in the previous stage, an increase that demands for People to be the top priority. The primary way a leader can successfully show a focus on People is by investing in the growth of the Leadership Team. The company is too large for the CEO to have regular, personal interactions with all employees. He or she must rely on the Leadership Team (who in turn invests in the Management Team), as the primary driver of successful employee engagement.
As an organization grows in complexity, so too does its need for structure to keep the complexity from turning into chaos. One important way organizations add structure is through Meeting Models. In general, smaller organizations are less complex than larger organizations, and necessitate fewer Meeting Models. As an organization grows, it should steadily add structure to more of its meetings.
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.
Every organization holds different types of meetings. Generally, some of those meetings would benefit from a greater level of structure. Good candidates include those that occur often, involve a significant amount of time, or have a high degree of impact. In cases where structure is desired, Meeting Models are a useful tool. Meeting Models are organization-specific templates that define a meeting’s purpose, outcomes, protocol, and positions/roles involved.
Stage 5’s Gates of Focus are Profit, People, and Process. In Stage 5, the attention must now return to Profit to ensure that enough capital is generated to sustain a larger organization. A leader can successfully focus on Profit in two key ways: 1) ensuring business development has a synergistic strategy across marketing, sales, and customer service to generate consistent and growing revenue; and 2) tasking departments to lower costs.
In Stage 7, the ideal Builder-Protector Ratio is 2:1, which means there is twice the level of confidence as caution in the organization. The 2:1 ratio reflects a relationship between Builders and Protectors that advances the company at a sustainable pace. The company will need to double its number of employees to grow completely through Stage 7, a process that can take a long time.
While an organization can have many types of meetings, not every type of meeting needs to have the same level of structure. Meetings improve when they adopt a suitable level of structure. While there’s no magic formula that reveals which meetings require more structure and which require less, we have identified three characteristics that can help determine the appropriate level of structure.
Stage 4’s Gates of Focus are Process, Profit, and People.
In Stage 4, getting scalable processes and systems in place is critical to facilitate future growth. Businesses that progress past Stage 4 without adequate attention to processes and systems will pay the price in later Stages. One of the most significant ways that a leader can focus on Process is by putting in place well-trained, professional managers who are capable of building strong departments. These managers should have the experience and skills to implement the building blocks necessary for their department to deliver high levels of quality in the functional area the department serves. These building blocks include scalable, trainable, and repeatable processes and systems.
Organizations of every size have meetings. Meetings are necessary to bring people together and create a shared perspective. Without meetings, people are left to make decisions in isolation, lacking input from other areas of the company. Since an individual rarely has a comprehensive view of a situation, it’s not typically optimal for just one person to run the show.
