The majority of my work these days tends to be with companies that need support in scaling up. That may be because they’re on a rapid growth path, and need to ensure that the business scales robustly. Or because they’ve plateaued (or started a slow decline), with a myriad of symptoms to boot.
In almost every case, the key has been empowering the right leadership team. Easily said, harder to do – which is why so many companies get stuck there.
There are a number of levers. The leadership team’s capability. The CEO’s willingness to genuinely empower them. The processes to make decisions effectively and the discipline to follow up. Clarity on purpose, direction, values, strategy, roles.
Interesting to read this in the story of Patagonia as told by its founder, Yvon Chouinard, in “Let my people go surfing”.
“I’ve found that whenever we have had a top manager or CEO leave the company […] the work continues as if they were still there. It’s not that they were doing nothing but that the system is pretty much self-regulating.”
Every CEO who is worried about scaling should ask themselves this. Have I enabled a system to take root in my company that self-regulates without my intervention? And on that basis, what is the new value that I can bring to the company?
Will 2022 be another year of a strategy at best vaguely met? Of being a CEO unable to step back from the day-to-day to do the things your company needs to meet it's ambitions? Of having a purpose and values that don't directly connect to everything you do? We're looking for an intimate beta group of CEOs (10 to 40 employees) to join us on this upcoming webinar to talk through our Build on Purpose framework for making strategy, purpose and values happen.