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.”
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.
Known as the Strategic Stage, one of the top five challenges Stage 6 businesses face is hiring quality people. With between 96-160 employees, the business has two or three times as many employees as the prior Stage. Hiring the people to enable this massive growth is always difficult but can be even more challenging when labor markets are tight. A company that distinguishes itself with clear, compelling values becomes a magnet to people looking for a rewarding place to work.
