April brings with it Spring – a season of growth for the natural world around us. With many financial years running from April, it is also a time when leaders start planning for business growth.
Many of the businesses I work with are in a growth phase, often as a result of making or planning acquisitions. They want to make sure they manage this period to ensure success for themselves and their teams.
Much time is spent by leaders looking at the commercial and practical aspects of how they want to grow. It is also important to make sure that the human elements are also considered and carefully managed.
Here I look at five people based strategies that I encourage business leaders to make part of their wider growth strategy for them and their team:
1. Curate the right culture
A recent Global Culture Survey of 3,200 leaders and employees worldwide found that 72% of leaders and employees report that culture helps successful change initiatives happen.
Teams and business that come to together will often have different cultures. As a foundation for growth you have to address the values and behaviours that you want going forward.
A female COO client of a financial investment firm was brought in to assist the growth strategy and streamline the operations. The company was making a number of acquisitions but was missing the culture needed to support this. She understood how important it was to establish a set of core values and behaviours that could be embedded across all teams. These were aligned to the vision, purpose, mission and corporate objectives. They also served as a blueprint of the kind of people they wanted in the business who needed to have an entrepreneurial mindset and be agile. This clarity made the business more attractive to people who wanted to join, as well as to investors.
As author Jim Collins says: “One of the key underlying variables enabling a company to go from good to great and to stay there, is that they have an underlying set of core values that do not change. Everything else is open for change: the practices, the strategies, the structures.”
When you have the right people AND infrastructure you have the right recipe for growth.
2. Align the strengths of your executive team
As businesses evolve and grow from their early days, their executive teams are often made up of functional department heads who are experts at what they do, but don’t necessarily demonstrate the skills needed to think more strategically about wider business growth.
A study by the Centre for Creative Leadership found that 65% of senior executives felt that their own executive teams suffered from a clash between functional and organisational accountabilities. Fewer than 1 in 5 rated their own executive teams as ‘very effective’.
Having established the wider purpose of the executive team, it is important to ask key questions, such as:
· What strengths do existing team members have that might not currently be tapped into?
· What gaps are there that need to be filled and who from the wider business may have the skills and strengths needed to join the executive or collaborate with them?
· What are the complementary skills within the team that can create more diverse thinking when addressing who to run key projects?
An executive team that was preparing for growth had an off-site strategic event to explore the strengths and capabilities within the team. Using a profiling tool specifically for executive teams, we were able to realign roles and responsibilities so that critical business objectives were being owned by the people that had those natural strengths. During this they recognised that one of them had a natural strength at motivating teams and getting buy-in to change. They were given a wider role in communicating and engaging within the business to influence change.
People were doing more of what they were good at. This made a significant difference to their success.
3. Know your own strengths & weaknesses
CEOs will often spend time thinking about the personal growth of their teams, without always focusing on their own.
ITV chief executive Carolyn McCall, who has led a digital transformation of the business, has spoken about how she has needed to constantly learn and adapt in the media industry to stay ahead of technological advancements and consumer trends.
As well as professional development, it can sometimes be about adapting your leadership style.
A CEO client who was a subject matter expert had a tendency to give direct answers to any issues when supporting his team. Indirectly he created a culture of dependency with team members deferring to him for decisions and solutions. His learning was finding ways to change his habits and adapt his style so his team could become more confident and independent in their thinking. This not only created a healthier environment, but gave him more time to focus on growing the business.
Whenever I meet leaders I am always interested in what they see as priorities for their own growth and learning. Seeing how curious they are about their own growth can tell you a lot about them as leaders and the culture they are creating.
Marks & Spencer CEO Stuart Machin is aware of the importance that starting in the company as a shelf stacker and working his way up the business has had on his ability to grow and lead. He has therefore made it a condition of passing an annual review that his executive team and head office managers must spend at least seven days a year on the shop floor.
4. Build your own resilience
Resilient business leaders can not only navigate challenging times and make bold decisions, but also inspire and empower their teams to do the same.
Being resilient to criticism and challenge is vital to the shaping of organisational culture, particularly when decisions you believe to be in the interests of people and sustainable success may not be popular with key stakeholders.
Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo was known for making tough decisions during her tenure. She championed investment into healthier products because she felt it was the right thing to do for long-term growth, despite initial resistance from shareholders focused solely on short-term profits. She put long-term vision and the health of consumers over immediate financial gains, knowing that she would have to handle a personal backlash as a result.
5. Map out your own career path
Knowing the direction you want to take your own career is important for personal success. I often work with individual clients on ‘Navigation Maps’, where we think about where they want to get to and then plan out the route for getting there.
A client is in a role she enjoys but knows that it does not serve her long term goals. She has ambitions to become a CEO in the next five to ten years, therefore any moves she makes, either internally or externally needs to have that compass. We’ve looked at the gaps in her experience and where she needs to gain additional experience, such as wider P&L responsibilities.
Can you make yourself part of someone else’s succession plan? Jody Ford joined Trainline as chief operating officer in 2020, but was also seen as the CEO-designate. This move gave him direction, as well as the time to prepare and position himself for the eventual step-up.
Having a growth plan and Navigation Map doesn’t have to mean looking for a new job, it could mean finding ways of taking on additional responsibilities within your current role. Are there committees you can join? Can you push to lead project teams? Can you take non-executive or trustee roles?
If you are thinking about growth plans and want to discuss success strategies for you and your team, please do get in touch at team@potentialplus-int.com.
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