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 advisory group suggested a number of seemingly sensible ideas: incentive programs, ‘quality circles’, and intimate company events. All well intentioned and potentially impactful – but let’s face it – these are ‘hit or miss’ solutions. What your organization REALLY needs is a better grasp of your organizations operating state; 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 performance are resilience and ingenuity. 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 depends on strong ties.
Take a slinky for example; stretch and let go - it returns to its original shape; too much force, it doesn’t bounce back. Ingenuity would be reflected in coming up with a whole new solution for what the slinky was designed for – to evolve in step or take a leadership position in your ecosystem. Coming up with that relies on having a weak tie network between departments and outside the organization.
What you can do
You can easily measure a slinky’s resilience. So too can you measure an organization’s strong and weak tie network – if you know what to look for. Want to find out more? Check out our latest blogs and case studies. Or contact us directly at info@businessingenuityinc.com; we’ll be happy to answer all your questions.