Are you feeling growth pains within your business?

As your business grows there are theoretical crisis points that you may experience in order to achieve the next stage of growth. Understanding these points, embracing them, and putting solutions in place to ease ‘the growth pains’ can help with your growth journey, and ease the resulting stresses. Instead of being crisis points, they can become transformation or transition points.  This blog briefly explains a few crisis points, and possible solutions.

Using a theoretical model can sometimes help put what you are seeing into context, for growth I find that Greiner’s Growth Model is effective. As per the visual below.

Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Greiner%27s_growth_model_%28english%29.png

Without going into detail about the whole model, looking at a few of the crisis points alone are helpful.  

• Leadership Crisis – the original founder or leader of a business finds that as their Company grows, so does the requirements on them.  They are pulled in lots of different directions, and they start to be unable to fulfil their own roles.  This can start to feel difficult and stressful for the owner, having to make all the decisions, manage more people, have oversight of everything, and do all the problem solving and so on.  In this scenario it can be helpful to have structures and processes in place so the owner can ‘let go’, leaving them time to utilise their expertise in the best way for the business.  

• Autonomy Crisis – The leader puts into place professional management to carry out activities within the business so they can delegate, however control is still quite often from the top. This in turn puts more demands on the owner of co-ordinating all the functional manager’s and activities, this turns into an autonomy crisis, where lower-level management demand and need to have autonomy.  For this to happen, it is helpful to formulate strategies such as budgets, rules and procedures for management to follow.       

• Control Crisis – Once the business decentralises and delegates to management, the managers can then start to pave the way in their own direction, and there may be little control and appropriate communication between each area of the business.  There could be silo’s forming, managers start paving their own way and the company is not aligned in its activities. In this situation interventions like ‘golden threads’ can help align the business, this can be shared goals, values, core competencies and so on.

The above looks at just a few of the potential crisis points that Companies can experience during growth.  If your business is feeling growth pains, there are solutions to help navigate the journey, and interventions you can put in place to help change the crisis to transition.  If you would like help, then I will be delighted to support you on your journey.