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Does Growth Have to be so Hard for Midsize Companies
The 2 Keys to More Progress for Midsize Companies How to Strengthen Your Competitive Strategy How to Build an A-Player Leadership Team How to Get Your Team Executing Efficiently How To Find Time To Work On The Business How to Change Your Mindset to Grow and Thrive Why a DIY Mindset Slows Growth 8 Types of External Guidance Why Doesn’t Leadership Training Stick Do You Have What It Takes? The 5 Criteria to Pick an Executive Team Coach  I was looking for a reference guide of common KPIs to make it easier for the leadership team of one of the companies I work with to identify appropriate metrics to drive execution.
I reached out to my network of colleagues in Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches. They suggested Key Performance Indicators: The 75+ Measures Every Manager Needs to Know, by Bernard Marr. The problem was there was no audio version and no text-to-speech feature. Listening to books while driving or walking my dog is my only option. So I found this “for Dummies” version by the same author. It did the trick. The gist of it In Key Performance Indicators for Dummies, Marr provides, not only a list of common KPIs across the essential areas of financial, customer, internal efficiency and people, but also a comprehensive guidebook to developing and implementing KPIs. While the book, in places, goes into more complexity than is needed for many mid-size companies, he does a nice job of explaining how KPIs connect with and support business strategy and execution disciplines. Marr, an expert in KPIs and big data, emphasizes how KPIs, effectively developed, can support a learning culture of fact-based decision-making where leaders test business assumptions and strategies through metrics. He also shares common pitfalls to avoid, such as tying compensation directly to KPIs, which unwittingly creates an incentive for employees at all levels to distort results. The alternative, in my experience, when incentives are implemented to support an already developed performance culture, is to tie them to numbers that are regimented, centrally controlled and therefore not easily manipulated, such as financial results. The irony of this book is that, while it’s designed as a go-to reference for picking KPIs, it recommends - and rightly so - to not just pick them from a list, but to do the harder thinking as a leadership team of what you’re aiming to achieve and what number you can track to tell you you’re making progress. Length of book: 320 pages. Bernard Marr is founder and CEO of the Advanced Performance Institute and author of 16 books on key performance indicators, metrics, big data, analytics and artificial intelligence. How can you execute on KPIs more effectively in your company? To find out how to have more efficient execution to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 4 to check your execution processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Incorrectly staffed leadership positions can paralyze your company growth. Here's what you can do about it.
When entrepreneurs come to me with growth problems, the question inevitably arises: Why? Is there a lack of market for the product or service? Is it the wrong strategy? Is it a lack of execution, or perhaps the leadership team? My counter-question comes off the cuff because it is unexpectedly direct and at the same time a very crucial question. I ask them: Who? Who sits in the management and leadership positions in your company today? If you were to fill these positions again, would you put the same person in that position again? And: Would this person be able to bring out their best, to have the best effect? Albert Einstein is said to have quoted the following: Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid . It remains to be seen whether Einstein actually said this or not. But let's expand on this point for a moment: what if the fish is already up the tree? Is he still learning to fly? Who is sitting in your tree right now? The question I would like to ask you at this point: Who is sitting on your tree right now – in the key positions in your company? And why is this person sitting there? Because of their leadership skills, because of their potential, or perhaps for other reasons? Is this leader, who may have been the right choice for this key position then, still the best choice today? Especially for the growth path you want? This question “Who is in the key positions right now?” is asked far too rarely - and usually only when all other attempts to solve the growth problems have failed. Why is that? Because the question is uncomfortable. You may even have been involved when these positions were filled. Who likes to admit that he or she has a personnel problem in the management ranks ? Many do not recognize wrong appointments immediately. Others tolerate them - out of friendship, lack of time (there are always more pressing issues that still need to be resolved) or lack of alternatives (a bird in the hand). It is poison to your business growth for two reasons: Reason No. 1: If you, as an entrepreneur, do not recognize your personnel problem, you will only notice the damage that the wrong people in key positions are causing when it is too late. Reason No. 2: As an entrepreneur, if you tolerate your personnel problem and hesitate to fill key positions, you consciously forgo the potential that more suitable candidates could bring and thus deny your company significant growth opportunities. Find the right people for your key positions What can entrepreneurs do now to ensure that the right people are working in your key positions? I ask my clients the following questions to honestly evaluate their leaders: 1. Does the person share the same values? Value-oriented leadership creates a common set of values that increases the cohesion and willingness to cooperate of all managers and employees. Knowing that a leader holds similar beliefs often encourages employees to follow them and increases the odds of success at each goal. This increases engagement, performance and even loyalty to the company – which in turn has a positive impact on growth and profitability. 2. Is the person behind the company's purpose? What does your company exist for and what is your specific contribution to make the life of your customers, our society, the environment, the planet, etc. a little bit better? When the "why" of a company is clear, it is easier for your teams to pursue your common goal. It is all the more important that your management team is 100% behind the purpose of your company. Because the more credible it is, the easier it is for you to tell an inspiring, gripping story and to set bold goals. The purpose is like the inner compass for everyone in the company. It brings people together, inspires them, gives them courage and the energy to think big, to defy setbacks and to keep going. 3. Has the person already gained experience in growth environments and do they bring the necessary skills for the position? Putting a company on a desired growth path is not easy. It's no picnic - neither for the company nor for the managers and teams. So you need people who are up to the challenge. It helps if they already have experience in such extreme growth environments. This way they understand what is required and expected of them. In high growth companies, managers deal with problems they've never had before. It's about trial and error, accepting mistakes, reflecting and learning from them despite the enormous pressure and ultimately turning failure into success. Noor van Boven, Chief People Officer at N26, recommends: "You should surround yourself with people who move in a similarly dynamic environment. You can be a painful critic, but honest feedback is helpful and has kept me honest as a leader." Who among your leaders walked the growth path? Who on your team may have just managed something big? Who is brave and not afraid of failure? 4. Does the person share the vision of the leadership you want? If a leader is to drive growth, then they must also think in these growth categories. Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, coined the term "growth mindset" in the 1970s. Leaders with a growth mindset welcome any opportunity to learn new things. They are willing to unlearn their ingrained beliefs and proven strategies. You are resilient to failure. They embrace failure because they see it as a natural part of learning. Or as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella aptly put it: "We are moving from a group of people who know it all, to a group of people who want to learn it all." Who among your executives continues to demonstrate a high willingness to learn? Who shares the same growth mindset? Conclusion The most important thing for entrepreneurs and owners of fast-growing companies is to surround themselves with the right people - and put them in the right positions. If there are problems with growth, having the wrong people in key positions is often the cause. If you ignore such misappointments, you consciously accept the negative effects they have on the motivation, performance and commitment of your teams. At the same time, you prevent better-suited executives from being able to contribute their potential and thus deny your company significant growth opportunities. What can you specifically do? Look for individuals in your leadership team who share the same values as you do in your organization. Make sure your leadership team has internalized the "why" of your company (the what that gives us purpose) and carries it consistently and authentically to their teams. Surround yourself with leaders who have experience in dynamic growth environments and have already demonstrated the necessary leadership skills. Work with executives who bring the same growth mindset as you do. With best wishes, Olaf Sell https://justgrow.eu/blog/ If you're interested in reading more of Olaf articles please visit the website link above. (Please note that Olaf's site is in German but Google translate does an excellent job of instantly translating it to English.) How can you elevate your people to the next level? To find out what you can improve in your leadership team to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist*. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. This report is complementary and involves no obligation. Complete section 1 and 4 to check your leadership team* and accountability processes*. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth.  In a previous 5 Minute Growth Tip article, I discussed how strategy is not a lengthy action plan but the evolution of a central idea about how a company can be unique and valuable to its customers.
So if a strategy is about how the company needs to compete, then how does a CEO and their A player leadership team make it happen? With a best practice execution plan and process. The Execution Challenge In my experience over the last 17 years working with leadership teams, when CEOs and owners of mid-size companies decide to do formal planning with their leadership team, they often go through a traditional strategic planning process. However, this often falls short of what they need to execute on their plan. Many strategic plans include a mission or purpose, vision and values. These are all important. Yet there is often little about how the company will compete in the market or how the plan will be executed. Often, these documents have vague plans for implementing whatever rough direction they’ve set out: some high level multi-year focus areas, or maybe some one year initiatives. In the best case, an annual budget is built with or without the strategic plan in mind. From there, the leadership team members may review the company’s numbers quarterly, or maybe monthly. Although often, this doesn’t happen either. In the meantime, the CEO assumes the leaders are working on making improvements and changes in their departments that align with the high level priorities set out in the plan. After a couple of quarters, a few things can happen:
Does this pattern sound familiar? Does it cause drama, tension and low morale? Usually so. Is it efficient? Not really. Does this hamper progress, growth and profitability? For sure it does. And is it any fun? No. So, what’s the solution? Not a traditional strategic plan. But a strategy (which I outlined here) and an execution plan and process. Our 3 key disciplines of low drama execution describe how it works: 1) Metrics and Targets, 2) Priorities and 3) an effective Meeting Rhythm. Metrics and Targets Watching the numbers may seem like the most obvious of the three disciplines. We all know that tracking financial results is an important part of monitoring whether we’re on track. However, there are other key numbers to monitor as well. While some metrics, like financial numbers, tell us how we’ve done, others give us an indication of how we’re going to do. This is the difference between lagging metrics and leading metrics. For a company as a whole, lagging metrics will be things like financial results, units delivered and market share. Some leading company metrics may be customer loyalty, on-time delivery, employee engagement or the percentage of employees that are A players. There are also different timeframes to set targets for with those metrics. We want to set mid-term targets for our key company metrics, say for 3 years out. These targets should align with our 10 to 30 year vision, or Big Hairy Audacious Goal, as well as our best-guess estimates of what’s possible with the core customer and sandbox we chose in our strategy. From there, we can set goals for those same metrics for the next year. For most of those metrics, we’ll also set goals for the first quarter. And finally, for many metrics, often leading metrics, we might be able to set monthly or even weekly milestones. Setting short-term goals that align with mid-term targets that align with a longer term vision allows the leadership team to commit to biting off a certain amount of progress each quarter. This way, we can check that we’re making enough progress over the weeks, months and quarters to achieve what we need to for the year, which will contribute to reaching our 3 year targets and our 10 year vision. The evolution of this is to work with each leadership team member to identify one or two metrics for each of the functions they lead, as well as goals for those metrics for the year and each quarter. Priorities Metrics measure the results and state of our day to day operations, and how they’re progressing towards our vision. Priorities, on the other hand, are the changes and improvements to those operations. These are what we want and need to implement to make it possible to achieve those mid to long term goals and targets. Going back to my first article in this series on how companies need to do things differently to continue to grow and profitably, these priorities represent, in part, those very structures, systems and processes. Priorities may also be about building or buying new facilities, equipment, or other significant capital assets, to expand or replace capacity. Priorities should also build the capabilities needed to bring to life or strengthen the unique differentiation we chose in our strategy. Like with metrics, we chunk these down from long term to mid term to short term. This again helps us make progress every quarter which supports the progress we want to make over time. We can start with planning out what’s needed over three years. These are all the changes and improvements that need to happen to achieve our 3 year targets. For example, “Developing our middle managers” or “Upgrading our manufacturing plant”. From our 3 year plan, we’ll choose our priorities for year 1 (we also call these Initiatives). They capture the handful of large multi-quarter change projects to bite off an important chunk of our 3 year plan. And from our 1 year priorities, we’ll choose quarterly priorities (we also call these Rocks). These are the multi-month change projects that will help us complete one or more of our annual priorities. The evolution here is for each leader to work with their own team to identify and choose the priorities they need to work on to change and improve their own departments. An Effective Meeting Rhythm It’s great to know what targets need to be achieved and what priorities have to be accomplished over the next quarter to make progress towards our mid-term and long-term goals. But we know that unforeseen things will happen during the quarter. Problems will come up. Things can get forgotten. People can lose focus. So, how do we make sure our leadership team executes on our quarterly plan in the midst of all that? Through regular communication. An effective and efficient meeting rhythm is the key. This meeting rhythm includes:
The purpose of weekly leadership team meetings are to check if our metrics and priorities are on track, take corrective action to keep them on track, and solve problems in the day to day operations or with the priorities. Daily leadership team huddles are to keep all team members in sync throughout the week and identify problems quickly so they can be resolved as they come up. Monthly leadership team meetings are to check that our metrics, priorities AND monthly financial results are on track, take corrective action, adjust the plan as needed and tackle larger tactical or strategic issues. Quarterly planning meetings are to check what we accomplished over the last quarter, adjust course for the year and set our goals and priorities for the next 90 days. The annual planning meeting is to assess overall progress, note market trends, adjust our strategy, long term vision and 3 year targets and priorities, and decide what we’ll bite off with our goals and priorities for the coming year and first quarter. With a clear purpose and a proven agenda for each type of meeting, and with the right people running the meetings and keeping things on track, these meetings can keep the leadership team and its members focused and executing efficiently throughout the year. Pulling it all together A clear, aligned execution plan and an effective execution process will minimize drama and maximize efficiency and goal achievement. However, this will work best if we create the execution plan with the leadership team, so there is efficient leadership team buy-in. And this goes for the strategy as well. Combine all this with strong accountability practices and having A players on our leadership team, and we have a powerful mixture to reliably implement the structures, systems and processes to implement our strategy, build capacity, and grow consistently and profitably...AND enjoy the ride. That said, this all may seem daunting if you and your leadership team are too busy working in the weeds. If that’s you - and most CEOs I meet have this challenge - read my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article on how to shift from working mostly “in the business” to working more “on the business”, and having more time for you and your family as well. How can your team execute with less drama? To find out how to speed up execution to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 4 to check your execution processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Boost team culture, effectiveness and moral In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a 15% to a Live Virtual Event – 6 Types of Genius in a Happy & Engaged Team – with Patrick Lencioni. Companies don’t need a broken culture right now. Unhappy staff and low levels of trust destroy teams.
Turns out, finding happiness and fulfilment depends not just on a healthy culture, but also from a deep understanding of your areas of working genius. The world’s foremost expert on organisational health and teamwork, Patrick Lencioni returns to Growth Faculty in 2023. He will share his fascinating research on the 6 types of working genius, and how organisations can create a culture that brings out the talent in their teams. Patrick is the pioneer of the organisational health movement. His 12 books, which include The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The 6 Types of Working Genius, have sold over 7 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. “[Patrick] challenges leaders to help their people unpack their innate talents and leverage them, not just for the benefit of the organisation, but for the direct benefits they can reap by living a more fulfilled life.” – Professor Kelly Goldsmith, Vanderbilt University “Patrick was a very compelling speaker. His examples were very relevant, and there were practical tips that I can start implementing from today.” Meagan Quinlivan, Senior Manager, Product Intelligence, News Corp Australia (attended Patrick’s 2022 masterclass.) Tuesday, May 23, 2023 - 6pm in MB, 5pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $295* | OUR NETWORK: $245*  *Prices quoted in USD. In a 2 hour live virtual team event, Patrick brings his storytelling abilities to explain his 20 years of research on teamwork, leadership, culture and high performance.
Access from anywhere this exceptional live and interactive session for executives and leaders, and their teams. Patrick will share how business leaders and their teams can:
What can you do to grow your mid-size company? To find out what you and your leadership team could do to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Great execution is critical to implementing strategy. But a great execution plan falls flat if there isn’t accountability. This is frustrating and costly. But it can be solved. I’m proud to share a Gravitas Impact podcast on this topic featuring my colleague Mark Green in New Jersey. Based on his Gravitas Impact monograph, Creating a Culture of Accountability, he shares guidance born out of the patterns he and our coaching colleagues around the world have identified working with CEOs and leadership teams from a variety of industries. In this 30 minute podcast, Mark explains the 3 pillars of accountability: 1) leading by example (there’s more to it than you think), 2) role accountability (how it really works) and 3) process accountability (how to make it happen). Subscribe to Gravitas Impact Podcast: Android
How can you create a culture of accountability in your company? To find out how to strengthen accountability to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 1, 2, 4 and 7 to check your processes that support accountability. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Patrick Lencioni is well-known for his business best-sellers: The Five Dysfuctions of a Team (which I introduced here last month), The Ideal Team Player, and Death by Meeting. His last best-seller, The Advantage - Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, is the culmination and integration of his previous works. It’s one of the most comprehensive and accessible books I’ve read on the key elements of an effective organization. In fact, many of the tools and concepts in the Scaling Up system and 7 Attributes of Agile Growth framework we use with companies are found in The Advantage. In the book, Lencioni describes a healthy organization as one with minimal dysfunction, politics, and confusion. Instead, clarity and alignment reign, resulting in strong performance. He argues that organizational health is the greatest advantage any business can have. And yet, it is largely ignored by business leaders. Lencioni clearly and logically lays out the four disciplines to creating a healthy organization: 1) build a cohesive leadership team - essentially the five focus-areas described in the Five Dysfunctions of a team: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results; 2) create clarity - of purpose, behaviours (ie. core values), offerings, competitive strategy, priorities, performance metrics and leadership team member roles; 3) overcommunicate clarity - repeated, aligned cascading communication from leadership team members to their direct reports and down the line; 4) reinforce clarity - through human systems - every process that involves people, from hiring and people management to training, compensation and termination. Lencioni then slips in a 5th unofficial, yet critical, discipline titled “The Centrality of Meetings”, drawing from his Death by Meetings framework. In it, he underlines that no action, activity or process is more central to a healthy organization than effective meetings, from the daily check-in (huddle) through to the quarterly off-site. A key point in The Advantage, which may be missed or forgotten, is that the single biggest factor determining whether an organization is going to get healthier, is the genuine commitment and active involvement of the top leader - the owner-operator, CEO or president. Book length: 240 pages, 5 hour 25 minute audio. Soundview summary: 8 pages, 21 minute audio. GetAbstract summary: 5 pages, 10 minute audio. How can you strengthen your organization? To find out how you can make your organization healthier to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist*. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. This report is complementary and involves no obligation. *Many of Patrick Lencioni’s best practices are included in our Agile Growth Checklist, as well as many others developed by world-renowned business leaders, researchers and professionals.
 Continuing with my article theme over the last few weeks of building a great leadership team, I’m excited to share a Gravitas Impact podcast on the topic from my colleague and mentor Mike Goldman in New Jersey. Based on his newly released book, Breakthrough Leadership Team, he shares his perspective, after thirty years consulting and coaching, that the biggest difference between a great company and mediocre company is the leadership team. It’s the growth “linchpin”, as I call it. In this 30 minute podcast, Mike shares more broadly how to build a great leadership team, and also dives deep into the one biggest challenge to that effort - ensuring the right leaders are on the team. Subscribe to Gravitas Impact podcast: Android
How can you strengthen your leadership team? To find out what you can improve in your leadership team to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. This report is complementary and involves no obligation. Complete section 1, 2 and 4 to check your leadership team’s collaboration, talent and accountability processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth.  In the previous 5 Minute Growth Tip article, I shared some tips for developing a successful strategy to compete and thrive in your market. Yet, developing a great strategy (and executing it) takes more than a framework. It takes a high performing leadership team. That, in turn, takes high performing leaders.
The People Challenge As a CEO, president, owner or entrepreneur, you’ve likely had department heads on your team that didn’t meet your expectations or were poor leaders. It can be frustrating to be repeatedly disappointed or to have to continuously push, cajole or just grin and bear it. Yet, it’s entirely feasible to resolve these headaches and prevent them from happening in the first place. This is about ensuring that, on the leadership team, we have the right people in the right seats doing the right things in the right ways. The key to getting it right is not to start by looking at the people. The first thing to do is define the right seats, right things and right ways, and then ensure we have the right people that fit what we need. Right Seats First, we want to ensure we have the right seats - the right roles needed on our leadership team. These usually include some common functional roles like marketing, sales, operations, accounting, finance, human resources, technology & systems, etc. Keep in mind that, often, leadership team members in mid-size companies need to play more than one role. Certain functions don’t need a full time leader just yet. By thinking of it this way, we can identify what functional roles are being played by each leader, and whether the right roles exist on the team. It may be that certain roles don’t exist that need to, or a role has been left unfilled. It’s also helpful to identify any roles that seem to have more than one person playing them, causing mixed messages and confusion. It may also be that certain leaders are in too many roles, therefore being stretched thin and dropping balls. Having the right seats means having clarity about what roles are needed and where there are gaps and overlaps. Right Things We also want to get each leader, and the whole leadership team, on the same page about what each role means and what is expected in terms of results (eg. role: marketing => results: qualified leads). It’s best if these results expectations are quantified with metrics and specific targets (eg. 50 qualified leads per month). The results, metrics and targets are the productivity side of each role. The “right things” will often also include the big changes and improvements that need to be made within each function over the course of the year and/or the quarter. Right Ways We also want to be clear about the behavioural side. This includes defining the behavioural expectations needed across the leadership team and across the company. These behaviours are captured in our core values. These core values distill the essential behaviours expected of everyone in the company, including the leadership team members. This is what enables great teamwork, productive conversations and problem-solving, developing a strong strategy and execution plan, and coordinating to execute. Clarity on core values is also critical because leaders living them is one of the main ways the company’s culture is brought to life among employees. Right People With productivity and behaviour expectations clear, we want to ensure we have the right person in each seat. We can ask ourselves: is each person on the leadership team meeting our expectations...in terms of both the results expected in their role AND the behaviours captured in our core values? Furthermore, if we want to build a thriving company, we’ll need A-players. We define A-players as being among the top 10% performers for the specific role and for the pay we can afford, AND they live and breathe all of our core values. Being a top 10% leader doesn’t just mean doing a great job at one’s function: marketing, accounting or human resources, etc. It means getting great productivity from their people - both quantity and quality of work. This takes strong planning, communication, delegation, monitoring and coaching skills. Often leaders tend towards one of two extremes: micro-managing or laisser-faire management. Strong leaders will stay involved enough to monitor and be supportive while at the same time letting experienced employees use their skills, be self-sufficient and take initiative. A-player leaders create an environment in their department that inspires employees to perform at their best. The Challenge of Behaviour Change When it comes to leaders who don’t live our core values, it’s often a dead end. Because a person’s values can’t really be changed. People behave according to what they believe. If they grew up believing that learning and adapting is valuable in its own right, they’ll learn and adapt on the job. If they believe that tradition, duty and compliance are noble, they won’t behave in adaptable ways. If they don’t believe in one of our core values, there’s often not much we can do about it. We can coach them on that core value, and they may start behaving more in alignment with it for a while. And if so, great. It’s worth giving it a try. But often, they’ll slip back into their habits. This means that often, a leader that isn’t living one or more of our core values never truly will. And so they’ll never be an A player leader, at least not in our company. Addressing the Gaps As CEOs, presidents and owners, we can often be hesitant to let a leader go who doesn’t fit. Our underlying concern is often that maybe we weren’t clear on our expectations or maybe we didn’t coach the leader enough or very effectively. So, it can be reassuring to start by establishing clear expectations and providing better coaching where needed. At the end of the day, the leader may still not meet our expectations. But at least we’ll know that we did what we could to support them. A good practice is to, every quarter, ask ourselves how each of the members of our leadership team are performing both in terms of results AND core values. Then, for any team members that aren’t performing, ask, what will I do about it this quarter? Will I coach them or cut the chord? If we keep coaching the leader on the same issue quarter after quarter, we should not only question their leadership, we should question ours too. A Caution Sometimes a leader’s poor performance IS in fact our fault. It’s entirely possible for a CEO to create an environment where people can’t perform well. Maybe we’re the micro-manager, or the laisser-faire manager. Or we set a poor example by not being accountable or not living some of our core values. If we have just one or two leaders whose performance is in question and the majority of the leaders reporting to us are performing great, we may have a people issue. Yet, if most or all of our leaders are struggling, chances are our own leadership is what needs work. Working Through Hesitation Usually, the decision to let a leader go isn’t hard. Once we think it through, it’s often pretty clear. It’s just that we avoid thinking it through. We avoid it because of how it feels. It’s sad. It’s disappointing. It’s nerve-racking. We can feel guilty or like a failure. If we acknowledge, accept and process those feelings, we can then face the facts of the situation and come to a logical, firm conclusion. This can usually be tackled with some pros and cons thinking, considering all the impacts of the leader, on both the culture and performance of their department, the leadership team and the company as a whole. Replacing a Leader It’s one thing to come to realize and accept that a leader has to go. It’s another to feel confident we can successfully replace them with an A-player. If you’re concerned about this, you probably have a recruiting and selection problem. And you’re not alone. The average hiring process picks an A-player 25% of the time. Implement the Top Grading or A-Method hiring process and you’ll notch that up to an 80 or 90% success rate. Replacing a top level leader is a great reason to make that change. You’ll get two trees with one stone: an A player leader and a drastic improvement in your hiring process. As Jim Collins found in his research for Good to Great, the foundation of a thriving company is “disciplined people”. This includes being a Level 5 leader (determined AND humble) and getting the right people on the bus in the right seats on our leadership team. Only then can we create a great strategy collaboratively with our leadership team, to achieve efficient team buyin. And with buyin and a great leadership team, we can implement the right structures, systems and processes to grow more rapidly, profitably and sustainably. Right? Not quite. This is where great execution comes in. In my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article, I’ll share the common challenges with executing a strategy and the three key execution disciplines to minimize drama and maximize profitability. How can you have more A-players in your company? To find out how to have stronger talent and leaders to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 2 to check your talent processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Do you know this situation? You have delegated a task to a manager or employee. This person knocks on your door after a few days because they are stuck somewhere and asks you for advice. You are familiar with the topic, maybe you have even solved a similar problem before. As a former expert, you mentally jump straight into finding a solution or ask detailed questions to explore the problem while the other person is still talking. But because you don't have the time right now, say you'll take care of it and get back to the person. Let's take a quick look at this situation in terms of monkey management. what just happened The problem (i.e. the “monkey”) of the person suddenly no longer lies with them, but sits on their shoulders, grinning broadly. Congratulations on your new job. In individual cases, this may not be critical. But let's spin the scenario a little further: Let's say you have a management team of five people and each of these people comes to you with a problem once a week. Suddenly you have 20 strange "monkeys" sitting on your shoulders every month, driving you mentally crazy, distracting you from your actual tasks and increasingly crushing you with their weight. Your evenings are getting longer, the hours of the week more and more. Coaching Example: Monkey Management and Unwanted Patterns This is exactly what happened to a coaching client of mine recently. Let's call him Jan. Jan is the founder of a successful startup that has raised millions in funding and has grown to 25 employees in a short time. As a natural scientist with a doctorate, Jan has extremely high expertise in his field and loves to solve complex challenges. Jan came to me because he was frustrated and stressed about having to do the work of his young leaders again. It has often happened that managers and employees came to him with problems and difficult tasks and sought advice. Due to his high level of expertise and his solution-oriented thinking, Jan was immediately drawn into the details and usually had a good solution ready quickly. All of his managers and employees appreciated this and word got around. Jan's executives now came to him more and more often when things got tricky. His employees were also happy to present difficult tasks and topics to him from time to time - with or without prior registration. And Jan often took on a particularly tricky part - and he already had the whole task on his desk. Since there is now no shortage of challenging tasks in fast-growing organizations, Jan quickly became a valued expert and sparring partner for his managers - and suddenly he was working more and more often for his management team instead of the other way around. In the course of our coaching session, two key questions emerged to which we sought answers together:
What Jan's team did was certainly not done with malicious intent. His employees simply knew that Jan had an extremely high level of expertise in his field. They had also learned that he had an answer or a good impulse for most questions. This had several negative consequences:
This is how Jan got rid of strange monkeys and unwanted patterns. During the session I presented Jan with the seven coaching questions – a coaching tool from Michael Bungay Stanier's bestseller “The Coaching Habit”. We then adapted these questions together in such a way that they would help him with his two challenges “Monkey Management” and “Avoiding Unwanted Patterns”. Jan's seven coaching questions First of all, I advised Jan to buy himself a few seconds for future calls for help from his team with a rescue question or a comment like: "Oh, that's an exciting question!" This should help him not immediately fall into his unwanted problem solver pattern. The following seven – slightly modified – coaching questions should help Jan to not let a strange “monkey” sit on his shoulder again. Question No. 1: What exactly is on your mind here? Jan thus plays the problem back to his employees and helps them to articulate it more precisely. Question #2: And what else? Jan asks this question three times in a row - in a slightly different form - and helps his employees to get to the root cause of the problem. Question No. 3: What exactly is the specific challenge for you here? With this question, Jan focuses the attention of his employees on exactly the point where they are stuck. Question #4: So what exactly do you want to achieve? Jan helps his employees to fast-forward and to develop a concrete vision for their solution. Question #5: If your problem were solved, what exactly would be different? How should the result look? What is the value of the solution? What might the solution look like? Here I consciously exchanged the original coaching question "How can I help" so that Jan does not fall back into his unwanted "problem solver" pattern. Question 6: Who else can solve this problem besides me and you? Who can point out a solution? Who of those affected or outside (suppliers, partners, acquaintances, former colleagues...) can still help? I replaced this question so that Jan could show his employees an alternative. Again, I swapped out the original question to get Jan out of his "helper syndrome". Question 7: What do you pull out for yourself? What do you take away from the conversation? With this question, Jan is supposed to help his employees to reflect. The aim is for his employees to recognize how they will tackle problems in the future and find solutions independently. Mastery through repetition These coaching questions initially sounded very strange to Jan. So that he could make them his own and find individual formulations, I recommended that he look for a buddy in the organization. That was a colleague or a friend he could try out these questions on. As with so many things in life, practice and repetition makes perfect. At the same time, this buddy from the organization should always watch with him when he slips into his original pattern and remind him what he wanted to do instead. Each time it will be easier for Jan to find his own formulations for these questions. And if he falls into an unwanted pattern again, his coaching buddy will point it out to him. Conclusion Do you sometimes struggle with the strange monkey on your shoulders or do you find yourself too quick to find a solution in conversations? Simply develop your own version of these seven coaching questions. Find a buddy in your organization with whom you can try out and practice these questions. Over time you will find your own formulations that sound less and less practiced. This buddy will also point out to you if you go straight into finding a solution instead of listening to your counterpart and helping him to find the answers himself. I wish you every success and enjoy trying it out! If you would like to learn more about coaching habits and unwanted patterns, I recommend these two books: “ Multipliers – How the best leaders make everyone smarter ” – Liz Wiseman " The Coaching Habit - Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever " - Michael Bungay Stanier With best wishes, Olaf Sell https://justgrow.eu/blog/ If you're interested in reading more of Olaf articles please visit the website link above. (Please note that Olaf's site is in German but Google translate does an excellent job of instantly translating it to English.) How can you elevate your people to the next level?
To find out what you can improve in your leadership team to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist*. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. This report is complementary and involves no obligation. Complete section 1 and 4 to check your leadership team* and accountability processes*. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth.  In a recent article, I wrote about the three basic elements of a successful strategy. I also mentioned that CEOs and their leadership teams can use other tools and practices to refine their strategy and make it more robust over time. Jim Collins’ flywheel concept, from his best-selling book Good to Great, is one of those refinement tools we use with midsize companies. This Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches webinar by certified coach and colleague Paul Cronin, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, covers how to apply the flywheel concept to strengthen a company’s strategy. In this 60 minute “under the covers” webinar, Paul explains the flywheel concept in detail and how it connects with the 3 key disciplines outlined in Good to Great, shares some great examples of flywheels (including his own as a coach - which, not coincidentally, is very similar to my own), and describes a process for discovering and developing your flywheel. How can you improve your strategy?
To find out what you can improve in your strategy to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 3 and 6 to check your strategy and customer processes. Complete section 4 to check your execution. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  End the cycle of fire-fighting work problems With our partner Growth Faculty, we offer you a 10% discount for Creating a Culture of Accountability - Live Virtual Masterclass with Mark Green. Accountability is a challenge for most of us. 84% of team members “try but fail” or “avoid” accountability, and 80% of people see accountability as punishing. (1) Over a 90-minute masterclass, leadership growth coach and author Mark Green will show how to close the costly and frustrating accountability gap. “An accountable employee owns their outcomes.” – Mark Green Mark is author of Activators – a CEO’s Guide to Clearer Thinking and Getting Things Done and Creating a Culture of Accountability. “WOW, WOW, WOW! That was an excellent and inspiring presentation. I am going to feed the right beast now!” – Liam Bailey, past Mark Green masterclass attendee Tuesday, April 18, 2023 - 4pm in MB, 3pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $130* | OUR NETWORK: $115* *Prices quoted in USD.
What can you do to create your accountability culture?
To find out what you and your leadership team could do to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  I’m always delighted when I read a Patrick Lencioni book. I enjoy both his clear take on things and his user-friendly writing style. So reading his best-seller, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, was a no-brainer. In the business fable style that Lencioni is famous for, he tells the story of the leadership team of a technology company. In it, he shows how leadership teams can use his simple model to deliberately improve their alignment, execution and results. Lencioni covers the five critical dysfunctions of a team, which each build on the other. They include: 1) absence of trust - not feeling comfortable being open, vulnerable and real - which leads to 2) fear of conflict - leaving things unsaid and avoiding sharing differing opinions - and therefore 3) lack of commitment - team members don't feel decisions are appropriate or feasible - which results in 4) avoidance of accountability - hiding performance, blaming or making excuses - and therefore 5) inattention to (team) results - not focusing on true progress and organizational impact. After the story, further details on the model follow with tips for working on each dysfunction. Out of all the team effectiveness frameworks I’ve studied and used, this one is the simplest. Yet, it’s still completely relevant and applicable. The Five Dysfunctions framework is also one of the tools in the Scaling Up system and the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth framework that we use with CEOs and leadership teams of mid-sized prairie-based companies. Book: 229 pgs, 3h45m audio. Soundview Summary: 8 pgs, 19m audio. Get-Abstract summary: 5 pgs, 10m audio. How can you strengthen your leadership team? To find out what you can improve in your leadership team to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist*. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. This report is complementary and involves no obligation. Complete section 1 and 4 to check your leadership team* and accountability processes*. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. *All of Patrick Lencioni’s best practices are included in our Agile Growth Checklist, as well as many others developed by world-renowned business leaders, researchers and professionals.  In the previous 5 Minute Growth Tip article, I wrote about how midsize companies can make more progress at implementing the processes and systems that will enable them to grow and grow profitably. But is it really progress if you’re not going in the right direction? And how do you know if you are going in the right direction?
While various types of processes and systems are needed to grow beyond a company’s current level (see the first article in this series), some types of systems will need to be chosen (or tailored) specifically for that unique business AND to support and execute its strategy in the market. Developing a clear strategy is not only important to making the right progress. It’s also important for ensuring a company is pursuing truly valuable growth opportunities. This brief article will cover the basics of clarifying and strengthening your strategy. From there, other tools and practices can be used to refine the strategy and make it more robust over time. The strategy misconception First, let’s recognize what strategy is NOT. As Jack Welch once put it, “Strategy is NOT a lengthy action plan. It is the evolution of a CENTRAL IDEA through continually changing circumstances.” A list of projects, priorities or action items is not strategy. That’s an execution plan. And what is this “central idea” Jack speaks of? I’ve been facilitating strategy development for 17 years. In all that time, the simplest, most accurate description of strategy I have come across is from Michael Porter, the renowned Harvard Business School professor, researcher and consultant. In his best selling book “Competitive Advantage”, Porter describes strategy succinctly as “a unique and valuable position in the market that involves a different set of activities from competitors”. Your “unique and valuable position in the market” is this “central idea”. And it needs to continually evolve to respond to changing circumstances. It describes the essence of the business you and your leadership team want to build. Your execution plan is how you’ll build it. Thinking of strategy as what needs to be done, rather than a vision for the business you are building, results in directionless busyness. Imagine building a house with no clear blueprints. How confusing would that be? It’s the same in a company. More Than Unique Let’s look at what Porter calls a “position in the market.” Put simply, this is about how your offering compares to competitors who offer the same or similar products or services. In the Scaling Up system and the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth, we use the term “Differentiation”. For most business leaders, like myself, it’s been drilled into our heads that our business needs to be unique. Porter confirms that this is important for our positioning. But why? To create customer loyalty. If our customers can only get our unique twist on a product or service from us, and they can’t get it from our competitors, they’ll keep coming back. Hence the more traditional terms used for Differentiation, including Unique Value Proposition, Unique Selling Proposition, Unique Offer and Competitive Advantage. They all essentially mean the same thing - a brief statement that describes how our product or service is or will be unique from our competitors. One example is SouthWest Airlines. While they provide air travel services like so many other airlines, they have clear differentiation, which is captured in their brand promise: “Low Fares, Lots of Flights, Lots of Fun”. This is unique in the american airline business. Yet Porter’s definition means our differentiation needs to be more than unique. It also has to be valuable. Valuable to who? Customers. Getting Focused This can be tricky. Because what’s valuable to one type of customer is not necessarily valuable to another. To make our differentiation valuable to a customer, we need to know WHO that customer is. Once we’re clear on who that customer is, we can define our differentiation, and then design our “different set of activities”, as Porter puts it, to consistently deliver that unique positioning. Note that, if we are to do things differently than competitors, to deliver on our differentiation for a specific type of customer, the number of different types of customers we serve has to be pretty small. Doing things in a number of unique ways that are each valuable to different types of customers becomes unprofitable, if not impossible, without sufficient scale. So for many companies, especially midsize companies, that often means focussing on one type of customer. We call them our Core Customer. How do we identify our core customer? We examine our best customers! The ones who are the most profitable, the most loyal, the most likely to refer, the ones who pay on time. In addition to knowing WHO are core customer IS, we have to know WHAT our core customer NEEDS. This enables us to then define differentiation that will be valuable to them. Without understanding our core customer’s needs, we’re just guessing. With clarity about who our core customer is, what they need and what differentiation would be valuable to them, we also want to make sure we can deliver on that differentiation. Maybe we aren’t fully set up right now to deliver on it. But we need to examine if we can get there. Regardless of our differentiation, those unique activities needed to deliver it need to be doable. If not, when we market our offering based on that differentiation, we’ll be making a promise to customers that we just can’t keep. Customers will be disappointed and become less loyal, rather than more loyal, over time. What Sandbox to Play In The Sandbox defines what specific products or services we’re going to offer, where we’re going to sell them, and through who. Through direct sales? Online? Through distributors, affiliates or retail? The Sandbox encourages us to proactively think through where our focus for growth needs to be over the next 3 to 5 years. It encourages focus also by proactively deciding to avoid products, geographies and distribution channels that will distract us. We may even choose to discontinue some we have right now. Choosing our Sandbox involves making sure these “what?”, “where?” and “through who?” decisions align with 1) our core customer, 2) our differentiation, and 3) our understanding or estimates of what products, geographies and distribution channels will provide the greatest opportunities for growth and profitability. SouthWest Airlines, for example, has determined that offering a first class service would not fit. It would take away from their “Lots of Fun” promise by treating some customers more lavishly than others. It would also increase complexity which would lengthen ground time, reduce the number of flights per day - “lots of flights”, and therefore increase costs and affect their “Low Fares” promise. Making it Work The three basic elements of a successful competitive strategy include:
This basic strategy work will be most successful when aligned with four foundational pieces: 1) our core purpose (or our Why, as Simon Sinek calls it - the difference we want to make in the world beyond creating jobs and profit), 2) our vision (or Big Hairy Audacious Goal - BHAG - as Jim Collins puts it - a 10 to 30 year company goal that is bold but stimulates innovation and progress), 3) our 3 year strategic targets - including financial, non-financial, - and 3 year highly achievable goal (or 3HAG as Shannon Byrne Susko calls it) that defines what we want the company to look like, 4) an awareness and understanding of the trends unfolding in our market and the world. And let’s remember, as CEOs, we’re best off developing our strategy collaboratively with our leadership team, in order to achieve “efficient leadership team buy-in” that supports “accountability for execution” (as discussed in my previous article). From there, we can develop our one year and quarterly execution plan to bring our strategy to life. With the right leadership team members and the right culture, we can execute with efficiency and predictability. AND, with the right leadership team members and culture, we are much more likely to develop a great strategy with that team. More about that in my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article. How can you improve your strategy? To find out what you can improve in your competitive strategy to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete sections 3 and 6 to check your competitive strategy. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  As we’re now just passed mid-way through the first quarter, I want to underline the importance of annual planning. Whether you don’t yet do annual planning, haven’t yet gotten to it for 2023, or want to improve, this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches podcast by senior emeritus coach, and a mentor of mine, Ron Huntington in Seattle, Washington, goes over how to complete effective, rigorous and productive annual planning. In this 30 minute podcast, Ron paints a vivid picture of effective planning by applying his experience as a pilot to the discipline of getting a CEO and leadership team from where they are to their desired destination, as quickly and safely as possible. The process and perspectives he shares mirror the planning I facilitate and coach leadership teams through annually. It’s a disciplined, rigorous, productive, yet tailored process that gets the whole senior leadership team clear on where they’re going and cohesively aligned and committed to how they’re going to get there. And as the COVID-19 aftermath continues, having a flight plan to not only survive - if your business has been negatively affected - but to also thrive, and make the best of the opportunities, is critical for organizations. Subscribe to Gravitas Impact Podcast: Android
Are you ready to grow a great top team, company and life? Try our Growth Readiness Self-Assessment to find out where you, your leadership team and company shine and where you could improve in order to grow, improve profitability, consistency and your quality of life.  Lead a culture everyone loves working in In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are pleased to offer you a discount for Vertical Growth: How Self-Awareness Transforms Leaders & Organisations - live virtual book club interview with Michael Bunting. “When I ask leaders to practice self-awareness, 99.999% of them don’t know how to do it.” Join in our 45-minute discussion with Michael Bunting on his latest book Vertical Growth. Vertical Growth is a process that goes deeper than just new skills development. It’s about conscious and deliberate practices that help us grow as human beings. Michael Bunting is the best-selling author and founder of The Mindful Leader, WorkSmart Australia, and Awakened Mind (a mobile app). His clients include HSBC, salesforce, Hilton, and Novartis. Monday, March 20, 2023 - 7pm in MB, 6pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $75* | OUR NETWORK: $69*  *Prices quoted in USD. ‘No matter how senior you are, after reading this book, you will not live or lead the same way again.’ ―Andre Viljoen, CEO, Fiji Airways What can you do to grow your mid-size company?
To find out what you and your leadership team could do to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  For those new to this classic, here's an overview of one of THE best books on building a great company. And, for those who’ve read it, consider this a brief reminder of the insights from this in depth research.
Released in 2001, Good to Great studied what made 10 “great” companies great, compared to comparable companies Jim called "good". Greatness was defined by a minimum 20 years of growth and sustained financial success that far outpaced the market or industry average. The book debunked a number of myths and identified 8 key factors to greatness: 1. Good is the enemy of great - the comfort of good enough gets in the way of putting in the effort to build a great company. 2. Level 5 leadership - in addition to ambition and determination, a level 5 leader is humble enough to exert their drive for the benefit of what they are creating, not for their own ego. 3. First who, then what - get the right people on the bus - on your team - before setting your strategy. 4. Confront the brutal facts (yet never lose faith) - believe you can prevail AND be realistic about what's happening and what's needed to get there. 5. Your hedgehog concept - compete successfully by playing only in the intersection of your three circles: what your passionate about, what you can be the best at and what drives your profit engine. 6. Culture of discipline - look hard at what to NOT be doing, including anything that strays from your hedgehog concept. 7. Technology accelerators - use technology not as a strategy in itself, but to enable and strengthen your competitive advantage. 8. The Flywheel - apply these concepts rigorously through small, consistent, aligned actions that reinforce each other and build momentum over time. We are forever grateful to Jim Collins for these fantastic research-based insights, which still hold to this day, and which the leadership teams we work with benefit from greatly. Book: 320 pages. Audio book: 6 hours. GetAbstract summary: 5 pages or 10m audio. Are you ready to grow a great top team, company and life? Try our Growth Readiness Self-Assessment to find out where you, your leadership team and company shine and where you could improve in order to grow, improve profitability, consistency and your quality of life.  In the previous 5 Minute Growth Tip article, I shared how companies need to implement structures, processes and systems in order to grow. Without this, they either won’t grow beyond the limits of their current structures, or they will grow inefficiently and increasingly unprofitable.
But as an owner or CEO tries to grow their company to 50, 100 or 200 employees, they may feel like the company is no longer making real progress with those kinds of improvements. Any changes they want to make in their company don’t seem to get done, or don’t get done right. So, how can CEOs increase their momentum? We know that, as a company grows, the CEO increasingly has to get things done through their top team. I covered this also in this previous article. The members of their top team are the ones who need to lead improvement projects within each of their departments and between and across departments. The two keys to making this happen are 1) efficient leadership team buyin, and 2) accountability for execution. Why progress slows with growth When a company is small, less than 10 or 15 employees, it’s more straightforward to get improvement projects done. Often, as CEOs, we just do these projects ourselves. As we begin to delegate these improvement projects, we simply ask a supervisor or front-line employee to get them done. If they are a strong employee, they will usually make it happen. When we have 25, 50 or 100 employees, it gets harder. The reason is what’s called “the power differential”: the difference between the influence of the CEO and the influence of others. In a smaller company, the owner is a strong voice that is heard more easily among the small group of employees. There are often no other voices that are similarly strong (unless of course there is one or more partners involved). It’s also easy to see when someone in a small group is not following through on a project. So each employee has a strong motivation to follow through on the owner’s direction. In a smaller company, there is a large power differential. As the company gets larger, the power differential decreases. As some departments get larger (eg. a production department), the leaders of those departments gain influence. They have now become critical people for the productivity and profitability of the company. The owner no longer has that same strong singular voice. One or more other leaders have strong voices as well. They tend to have more influence about decisions made for the company, and certainly their own department. As well, the owner becomes more detached from the front-line and may feel less confident about what is the right thing to do. The other influential leaders now often have a better perspective on what needs to be done in the operations. This also increases their influence. The owner may therefore feel less influence to be able to simply ask others to take on and carry out improvement projects they dream up. They know they need these high-influence leaders to make things happen. And they may recognize that they lose their leaders' commitment and initiative when they just tell them what to do. The result is that getting leaders to make changes and improvements in and across a mid-size company becomes more challenging than getting front-line employees and supervisors to do so in a smaller company. The trick is in the two keys: 1) efficient leadership team buy-in, and 2) team-based accountability. Efficient Leadership Team Buyin Rather than a CEO figuring out on their own what needs improving and changing for the company, and simply delegating those projects to others, they need to shift to making decisions for the company in collaboration with the members of their top team. This will enable them and their top team members to make company decisions that they’re all committed to. In short, as the saying goes, “people support what they help to create”. This doesn’t mean the CEO doesn’t get the final say. It’s how they get to a final decision that needs to be adjusted. Patrick Lencioni, in his best-selling book, The Five Dysfunctions of a team, called this approach “disagree and commit”. The top team discusses the problem or opportunity and gets all the information out on the table for consideration. Options are discussed and weighed. All members of the top team have the opportunity to share their perspectives and concerns. If an agreement is easily made, then great. If not, the CEO makes the final decision with everyone knowing their perspective has been heard and considered, and agreeing that now is the time to commit to the final decision. This approach allows for effective leadership team participation, while keeping it efficient. This can be a game-changer for CEOs who have already shifted to involving their top team in decision-making, but have gone too far. Their decision-making may have slowed to a crawl, or decisions simply don’t get made, because they and their leadership team members don’t always agree on what’s best. And the CEO isn’t willing to make a final decision for fear that their leaders won’t buy in at all. “Disagree and commit” solves this problem. Accountability for Execution Once there is top team buyin to a decision, how do we ensure accountability for its execution? Buyin is certainly important for accountability. But it’s not enough. Accountability ensures that leaders assigned with taking on certain improvement projects follow through as best as humanly possible. Accountability also means being open and transparent when a project or special effort doesn’t go as planned, so all possible action can be taken to get it back on track. Accountability, also, is more difficult as a company grows. And it’s also due to the changing power differentials. Simply following up one-on-one with individual leaders no longer works as well. Leaders of larger departments have more influence, and their performance is more hidden in a larger company. So there is less pressure to follow through. The solution is again a team approach. Mark Green, a colleague of mine in Virginia, and a peer member of Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches, captured the key ingredients for accountability in his recent monograph titled “Creating a Culture of Accountability”. There are three ingredients for accountability:
Self-accountability is where the CEO, as the leader of the team, leads by example by acting accountably themselves, ensuring they have the right people in the right seats on their leadership team, and raising their expectations of their leaders. Role accountability is about ensuring each leader is clear about their own and each others’ accountabilities. This includes defining the specific results expected for each role and the metrics that make those expectations clear. Note that it’s just as important for leaders to be clear on each others’ roles as their own. This ensures only one person is accountable for each function and everyone is clear on what to expect from others. Process accountability includes communicating about decisions they’ve made in a way that maintains leaders’ natural motivation to execute. This includes believing in their ability to succeed, reminding them why it matters and paying attention to their progress. Process accountability also involves: - ensuring planning happens before action, and on a consistent basis, - having a rhythm of effective and efficient meetings that ensures regular follow-up on progress and results, - and regular one-on-one coaching between the CEO and each leadership team member to develop and support performance. From leading individuals to leading the top team Efficient leadership team buy-in and team-based accountability for execution are the two keys for CEOs to enable continual improvement to grow their mid-size companies. And we can see a common thread for the CEO: shifting from directing individuals to leading and building the top team. This shift can be challenging for CEOs who have become comfortable with a directive style. Yet shifting to leading the top team is critical to getting their leaders bought in, executing, and making more progress. But is it really progress if you’re not going in the right direction? And how do you know if you are? More on that in my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article. How can you increase your momentum? To find out how to make more progress to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete sections 1 and 4 to check your company’s leadership team and execution processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  In my work with the CEOs and Executive Teams of mid-size companies, I’ve often met CEOs who think it’s HR’s job to build the culture. They say “Oh that’s people stuff – so that’s HR’s job.” And that’s a big mistake. It’s actually the CEO’s job. Why is that? As the first featured speaker on Innovation Place’s new Brain Bites mini-video series, I shared what my colleagues and I have seen and what we teach as executive team coaches on this topic. Watch the 4 minute video here, or read the article below. The fundamentals
Let’s start with what culture really is, why it’s important, and how we build it. When you strip it all down, a company’s culture is how people, in the company, behave. Culture is important because the more that people behave in similar ways in a company, the faster the company moves. The more peoples’ behaviours are different, the more unproductive conflict there is and the slower the company moves. This is what a strong culture means. it’s one where people behave in similar ways. How do we create a strong culture? With core values. What are core values, really? Core values are a handful of rules we define to help, guide, employees’ behaviour – our culture. To get people to behave in similar ways, according to the core values – meaning to build a strong culture – the leaders have to do 3 things: - define the core values - repeat them often - live by them themselves Culture comes from leaders’ beliefs One mistake companies often make is they come up with core values that are about who they want to be, what sounds impressive, or what would look nice on their website. But that doesn’t work. Because the leaders won’t behave according to those core values, because they don’t believe in them. If the leaders don’t believe in them and don’t live them, employees won’t either. Because employees don’t do what leaders say, they do what leaders do. So if you want your company’s core values to help guide your employees to do what you do, the core values need to reflect what you really believe, and you need to behave according to those core values. HR can support, but the CEO should lead Putting HR in charge of culture takes this process out of the hands of those who really need to own it and lead it – the senior leadership team. And who needs to own the core values the most and believe in them the most? the CEO. Because the CEO will need to be the top ambassador of the core values, live those values him or her self fanatically, and hold the executive team members accountable to live them too. HR can support the CEO and leadership team’s culture building activities. And certainly, HR’s processes and policies, like employee selection and performance evaluation, need to align with the core values to help build a strong culture. But every process and policy, in every function or department, needs to align with the core values, not just HR. And even more important than the processes and policies is how the leadership team members behave – starting with the CEO. If those behaviours match our core values, people in the company will behave in similar ways – that is, the culture will get stronger, and the company will move faster. What if the CEO is too busy? If you’re a CEO, you may be thinking “but i’m too busy to build the culture”. Maybe so. And why are you too busy? Are you firefighting? Are you dealing with unproductive conflict? Are you dealing with problem employees? Chances are, a part of the reason you’re too busy is because you’re dealing with the symptoms of a weak culture. Strengthen the culture, and your job gets easier, and everyone else’s does too. And that’s why it’s the CEO’s job to lead culture-building. Are you ready to grow a great top team, company and life? Try our Growth Readiness Self-Assessment to find out where you, your top team and company shine and where you could improve in order to grow, improve profitability, consistency and your quality of life.  We can all benefit from making self-care a higher priority as we start off the new year.
This will benefit us certainly, and also our leadership teams, companies and communities. One excellent resource is a book I use with CEOs that represents, what I believe, is the missing link for CEOs of mid-sized growth companies. Written by my colleague, senior Gravitas Impact coach, Kevin Lawrence in Vancouver BC, Your Oxygen Mask First is a breakthrough in the art of leadership, self-management AND self-care. We can find dozens of fantastic books and tools to learn the nuts and bolts of growing a successful company. And there are a few methodologies, like our Scaling Up method and 7 Attributes of Agile Growth, that bring many of those essential tools together to make them more accessible for mid-size companies. However, the missing link is the CEO factor: the leader themselves and their skills for taking care of themselves first, so they can take better care of their people and their business. Your Oxygen Mask First makes clear that it’s a myth that CEOs can build successful companies sustainably by putting everyone else first. In truth, this leads to burn-out and tragedy. It’s a dirty secret we need to talk about. Kevin wrote Your Oxygen Mask First based on the experiences and tools he gained over 20 years as a coach and advisor. The book covers the 17 habits Kevin has tried and tested for leaders to lead well AND take care of themselves, so they have a great company AND a great life. I highly recommend it to any CEO, president or executive leader. Book: 231 pgs, 3h46m audio. Find the book, ebook and audible book here. Are you ready to grow a great top team, company and life? Try our complimentary Growth Fitness Self-Assessment to find out where you, your leadership team and company shine and where you could improve in order to grow, improve profitability, consistency and your quality of life.  Build a stronger organisation with this great onboarding proces In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are pleased to offer you a 10% discount for Onboarded: Fast Track New Hires To Success - Live Virtual Masterclass with Brad Giles. Onboarding is a critical engagement and retention tool. 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experience great onboarding. ** In this 60-minute masterclass, leadership coach and author of Onboarded, Brad Giles will share a simple step-by-step process to accelerate the effectiveness of new and existing team members. “The new hire traverses three stages of understanding, learning and applying, which should be embedded, whereby at the end they are a successful fit into the role,” says Brad. Founder of Evolution Partners, Brad works with CEOs and leadership teams to build enduring, great companies. He is the author of Made to Thrive and Onboarded. “By implementing Brad's onboarding strategies outlined in this book our team retention for new starters within the first 12 months doubled which had a huge impact on the culture of Aventus and ultimately our financial results.” Darren Holland, CEO, Aventus Tuesday, February 21, 2023 - 7pm in MB, 7pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $130* | OUR NETWORK: $115* *Prices quoted in USD. **Arlene Hirsh, ‘Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Good Onboarding’, 2017, SHRM, from Click Boarding data
What can you do to grow your mid-size company? To find out what you and your leadership team could do to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  In the 11 years I’ve been an independent coach and advisor, I’ve seen many companies that grow to a certain point and, despite all their best efforts, can’t seem to grow beyond that.
I’ve also seen companies that do continue to grow but become less and less profitable, and more and more stressful for the owner or CEO. Turns out this isn’t just my experience. It’s a common pattern. Growth isn’t common Out of the roughly 28 million firms in the US, only about 1.1 million have surpassed a million in revenue. Only 112,000 have gotten past $10 million. And only 17000 have grown beyond $50 million. The reason is that companies need to operate differently as they grow. Companies that don’t adapt how they operate will tend to grow to the limits of that way of operating. Owners, presidents and CEOs who have had success getting to a certain point often tend to repeat what they know, thinking “well, it got us here.” But, as the title of a book by Marshall Goldsmith goes, “what got us here won’t get us there”. The systems to manage a growing team The changes needed for a growing company are driven by the added complexity that comes with having more employees. Think simply of going from 2 to 4 employees. This makes the number of relationships between individuals increase from 1 to 10. This complexity continues exponentially as the company grows from 10 to 25 to 50, 100, 200 employees or more. To predictably achieve results within this growing complexity, a certain level of order is needed. Processes, systems and structures create that order in companies. And the systems needed to create order in the complexity of a 200 person organization are different than that of a 100, 50, 25 or 10 person organization. For example:
Hitting the ceiling, valleys of death Any company within one stage will usually hit a ceiling if they keep doing things the same way they always have. Companies that don’t make the right changes, or aren’t successful in making those changes, will fall into what we call a “valley of death”. Valleys of death are where the leadership makes big investments, but they don’t work out. So the company doesn’t move beyond that stage. The company can also fall backward in terms of revenue and often profitability because of the failed investments. Worst case, it can lead to company failure. Growing unprofitably Some companies grow despite not making the changes needed for the next stage. With sheer grit or dramatic demand growth, they’ll grow. However, these companies often become increasingly inefficient with the increasing complexity and resulting chaos. And so the company’s profitability will decrease, sometimes significantly. Unless exceptionally well funded, with investors willing to accept short to mid term losses for a longer term windfall, the decreasing profitability and resulting cash flow challenges will eventually prevent the company from investing in the capacity to grow and the systems to grow profitability. And so growth will stall. One can also count on drama, stress and headaches being the overarching theme for the leaders. So what stops a company from making the right changes and improvements to grow successfully and profitably? The CEO and leadership team are the linchpin From these stages and key changes, we can see early in a company’s life - by about 25 employees - that an owner or CEO has to learn to get results from people through other managers. That means the changes and improvements the company makes will depend on the CEO working WITH top level managers as a team…a leadership team (or management team, executive team, or whatever you want to call it) . And, very often, leadership teams in mid-size companies are working in silos and at cross purposes. They often are too focused on the day-to-day, so the big projects to move the company forward often don’t get done or aren’t done right. The result is the company doesn’t identify or successfully implement the right processes, systems and structures to handle the increasing complexity of a growing company. It’s the CEO’s job to pull their leadership team together, get them all going in the same direction, moving in lockstep, making the needed changes and improvements to enable their broader team to keep growing. An always-evolving leadership team The challenge of having an effective leadership team continues through the life of the company. New leaders come and go. Markets evolve. Systems need to change. And so the capabilities of the leaders and the team need to evolve as well. The crucial underlying challenge to achieving profitable growth is to build, maintain and continuously improve a great top team that is highly capable, aligned, leading and executing effectively and efficiently, and therefore minimizing silos and strengthening execution between and across departments. Essentially, working as one unit to move the company forward because the owner CEO can’t do it alone…because it’s too much for the owner or CEO to do it alone, at least effectively and sanely. More about that in my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article. What systems can you improve to grow a thriving company? To find out what systems you and can improve to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  In our experience, CEOs often don’t pay a lot of attention to the financial optimization of their company, unless their accounting is broken, they have a financial background themselves, or they have a strong CFO at the table. In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches webinar, Dominick Becivenga, former VP with Citibank and current President of A Team Consulting in New York, discusses how small to Mid-Market CEO’s could create financial predictability and a competitive advantage by investing in their financial and accounting technology and strategic talent. Subscribe to Gravitas Impact podcast: Android
What can you do to optimize your finances? To find out what you and your leadership team can do to improve your financial position to more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 5 to check your financial processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  When it comes to developing a revolutionary product, or responding to one developed by a competitor, why do so many established companies fail?
Innovation thought-leader Clayton Christensen shares his research and guidance in The Innovator’s Dilemma. There are “two principles of good management” commonly taught in business higher education: 1) always listen to and respond to the needs of your best customers, and 2) focus investments on those innovations that promise the highest returns. In practice, however, these principles are often the root causes for a company’s demise. The central idea is that companies become successful by developing their organizational capabilities to do the work needed to sell, produce and deliver products or services to their target market. However, when a related disruptive technology or opportunity emerges, the customer market is somewhat different, at least initially. And the organizational capabilities needed to be successful also differ. Established companies often try to respond to, or develop, a disruptive technology from within their company, using their legacy organizational capabilities. This tends to fail. Alternatively, they change their existing capabilities to support success with the new technology, which usually erodes their core business. The solution, for truly revolutionary technologies, is to spin out a separate team that can develop the new organizational capabilities. Internal teams, by contrast, work best for evolutionary technologies. Note that Clayton Christensen’s research, outlined in this book, aligns well with the findings of Chris Zook summarized in Profit from the Core (which we introduced last month). In that book, Zook outlines how companies are most successful when they innovate with extensions of their existing products and services, extensions that leverage their existing capabilities, rather than entirely new offerings that require different capabilities. The added nugget in Christensen’s research is that entirely revolutionary offerings CAN be successful, but not WITHIN the company. A separate organization, with unique capabilities, needs to be created to focus on that disruptive opportunity. Book: 288 pages. Book summary on Soundview: 8 pages, 18 minutes audio. How can you improve your innovativeness? To find out how to improve your innovativeness to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Learn how adaptability, resilience and optimism can help you manage change In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a 10% to a Live Virtual Masterclass – Adaptability: Your New Competitive Advantage – with John Spence. Constant disruption creates anxiety and stress. To survive and even thrive in this pressure-filled environment, individuals and organizations must increase their Adaptability Quotient (AQ). From a business standpoint, AQ is the ability of your organisation to be agile and adjust its course in response to unexpected shifts in the marketplace. On a personal level, AQ measures your ability to react quickly and effectively to change. In a new 90-minute masterclass with highly rated speaker and coach John Spence, learn what it takes to become more adaptable, agile and adjustable. In this session, you will:
A very popular Growth Faculty speaker, John’s last masterclass was rated 9.5/10 by attendees. “Three keys to success in business are focus, discipline and action.” - John Spence Tuesday, February 7, 2023 - 6pm in MB, 6pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $130* | OUR NETWORK: $115* *Prices quoted in USD. What can you do to grow your mid-size company?
To find out what you and your leadership team could do to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation. |
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