Creating and managing rapid growth

Company goals
• Gain significant market share as products become widely used
• Become a market leader and ward off competitors
• Build infrastructure and management team to support aggressive growth
• Hire and integrate a lot of new people

Characteristics of this phase of growth
• Competition heats up and customers grow more demanding; there's huge pressure to deliver more
• Tension between the need to move fast versus the need to build structure, plans, and systems
• Staff and management grow quickly and become more diverse
• Business is market focussed
• Planning begins and people work to the plan
• Operations start to be standardized and streamlined
• Expectations of the company from all constituencies are huge
• The fast pace is extreme

Problems you are likely to encounter
• Feel pressure to fill voids in company's functional expertise
• See the need to build your management team's ability to streamline and coordinate their functions and work together as a team to plan for the future
• Want to be more proactive, but hard to find time
• Always feel behind the curve
• Hard to keep the original culture as new people are added
• Best way to fund growth is unclear
• Some original employees can't keep pace with growing responsibilities
• You realise how easy it would be to lose control

Dangers of not changing
• Functional silos, office politics, and even infighting will develop
• People will complain about having too many priorities and spending all their time fighting fires; they will lose touch with vision, strategy and goals. People will think that the culture and values aren't important to you
• Products will begin to look tired; competitors will start to bite at your heels
• Lack of structure and process will create delays; it will be too hard to get things done
• People won't feel empowered and will feel they are spinning their wheels
• The company will lose focus and won't be able to grow
• Decline

Leadership roles needed
• Team builder
• Coach
• Planner
• Communicator

Critical responsibilities
• Hire people who are smarter than you to fill gaps in functional expertise
• Help management team work together productively with mutual trust
• Define new roles/responsibilities and goals for management team
• Lead the team in creating a strategic market-focussed vision and plan for growth and in following it
• Create processes to continually align employees - especially the management team - with company's vision and culture
• Drive a meaningful communication process, including being a champion for market and customer information and communication
• Listen to and consider views of all constituencies

Personal changes required
• Use the company's plan to focus and track efforts
• Shift your focus from doing work to managing and coaching others
• Stop being the ultimate decision maker in every area; develop a consensus-orientated decision-making style and capitalise on your team's abilities
• Learn to facilitate effective teamwork; hold team meetings more frequently that one-to-one discussions
• Encourage all ideas to be heard in a healthy debate that allows for criticism
• Stop tolerating organizational misfits
• Admit you don't have all the answers or ideas; focus on unleashing the creativity of others
• Be a champion for effective, efficient processes
• Consciously balance your time, working equally between the big picture and daily operations

After "Leading at the speed of growth" by Catlin and Matthews

If the above issues apply to your organisation, contact Paul Chapman on 0207 100 1233 or via the contact us facility