Growth pains
Five years in, your business is growing at an unprecedented rate. However, with growth, you are no longer directly involved in the hiring process and subsequently, don’t have the personal relationships of loyalty, which were especially important with entry level hires. Finding and keeping the kind of people who made your business initially successful is increasingly difficult.
You suspect the problem is beyond your ability to identify and assess, and your instincts tell you that you’ve come face to face with “a culture problem”; But what exactly is that?
Necessary but insufficient
Your CEO group suggested a number of seemingly sensible ideas: incentive programs, ‘quality circles’, and intimate company events. All well intentioned and potentially impactful – let’s face it – these are ‘hit or miss’ solutions. What your organization REALLY needs is a better grasp of organizational culture; something you can measure, in terms of how it is affecting what’s most important – company’s performance.
Our take:
Culture is a hard thing to get your arms around but fundamentally, as a CEO, the two things you need for sustained viability are resilience and adaptability. High resilience means you have the staying power or bounce-back-ability when knocked off course whereas low resilience sends your organization into a tailspin. Resilience is system related. Take a slinky for example; stretch and let go - it returns to its original shape; too much force, it doesn’t bounce back. Adaptability would come into play when anticipating the system is not currently capable of withstanding an anticipated force.
What you can do
You can easily measure a slinky’s resilience. So too can you measure an organization’s resilience – if you know what to look for. Our Cultural Alignment Survey measures resilience and adaptability. Click here to get an initial impression of your organization’s resilience and adaptability.
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