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.”
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.
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.
A Stage 1 company’s Gates of Focus are Profit first, People second, then Process third. Business leaders embracing these Gates of Focus should be constantly thinking about how decisions will impact the company’s profitability. Their energy should be focused on activities that generate revenue and increase profits.
In Stage 3, the ideal Builder-Protector Ratio is 1:1, which means there are equal levels of confidence and caution within the organization. This high level of caution helps stabilize the organization as it goes through the important transformation of being owner centric to becoming enterprise centric. The shift from being owner centric to enterprise centric is uniquely challenging. To manage the stress, the pace of change must be deliberately slowed. A reduced pace will create the stability needed to successfully survive the transition.
An Organization Chart, or Org Chart, is a basic tool used by many businesses to communicate where individuals fit within an organization. In Organizational ReWilding, the variation of this concept is called a Functional Org Chart. The key difference is that the Functional Org Chart focuses on positions, not people; no names appear on the chart.
In Stage 2, the ideal Builder-Protector Ratio is 3:1, which means there is three times the amount of confidence as there is caution in the organization. The other way to understand the 3:1 Builder-Protector Ratio is that 75% of the team are Builders, while 25% are Protectors. An organization with a 3:1 Builder-Protector Ratio exhibits a very high level of confidence.
As companies grow and organize into departments, it’s common for them to fall into a siloed mentality where they only see the needs in front of them and do not consider the needs of the company as a whole. This leads to challenges with planning and knowing how best to allocate resources. The Interdepartmental Planning Process helps leaders overcome those challenges by providing a means to weigh the needs of their departments against the other needs of the company. In this way, leaders from various departments can come to a consensus about what needs to be prioritized for the benefit of the organization.
