In a perfect world your business is booming, the organization is growing, orders continue to pour in and customers are consistently thrilled with your products or services. Sounds idyllic, no? The sad truth is that many companies find themselves in this position but then begin to flounder as they struggle to keep up with demand. They underestimate the time and energy needed for talent acquisition and don’t have a formal training plan in place. The business model that was perfectly suited for a company of 10 cannot properly support a rapidly expanding company of 28 or 50 or 150.

In order to create a scalable organization, one that can maintain a lauded client experience while growing to meet demand, an organization can employ this 4-step approach:

Step 1: Discover the Core Attributes of the Client Experience

This step is designed to identify what makes your organization unique. Here, the organization’s strategies, systems, personnel and procedures are investigated to determine how each of these things contributes to the organization’s culture.

Through an appreciative discussion process, a clear picture of what it is like to work in your organization when it is performing at its very best emerges.

Step 2: Identify Enabling Leadership Behaviours & Beliefs

As an organization grows, certain leadership behaviours and beliefs are required to support the consistent delivery of both key results metrics (the what) and core attributes (the how).

This phase uses the information collected in the Discover Step to guide the initial development of what these key behaviours and beliefs are, resulting in a leadership competency model.

Step 3: Align Leadership Behaviours and Beliefs

This next step sees the leadership competency model put into application with the leadership team.

This is a collaborative process where the key leaders of the organization can explore both individual opportunities for growth and how to work together as a team to support the development of leadership competencies throughout the organization.

This phase is critical to success and usually includes individual and group coaching, team facilitation and training to ensure all parties are in alignment.

Step 4: Embed HR Systems that Reinforce Behaviours & Beliefs

In this last step the company’s HR systems (Recruitment and selection, Performance management, etc.) are also tweaked, changed or created to support the leadership competency model created throughout this process.

The importance of creating a scalable organization that excels in periods of growth and can both maintain and nurture your corporate culture cannot be underestimated. Taking the time up front to discover, identify, align and embed the leadership behaviours and beliefs that make your organization unique can be instrumental in your continued success.

 

 

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David Swain, BSc Mgmt., MSOD, CEC, PCC with over 30 years’ experience in both coaching the leaders of large organizations and leading them himself.
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