Managing High Growth: Using Your Culture for Competitive Advantage

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In my earlier piece about the importance of culture in high growth businesses I talked about how culture is considered a soft skill and that most business people tend to ignore it, mostly because there is no imm

Aleutian Cultures (Photo credit: Travis S.)

ediate quantifiable benefit and of course because it involves dealing with people. That's for HR people isn't it?

What I wanted to share in this post was the idea that culture can be a potent weapon by giving you an important competitive advantage. If implemented and understood it can help significantly in promoting a company's growth. Your culture establishes how your company and its staff interact with one another and with the outside world (your customers and prospects). It reflects your core values and your ethics.

So how is this a competitive weapon? Well lets look at two areas where High Growth Businesses experience problems. Finding and keeping the right staff and dealing with new problems. 

All high growth businesses face many challenges which are outside the experience of the owners or the senior staff. There is naturally a high degree of risk involved in making decisions in this environment. However as a business owner you don't want to be the only person who makes these decisions and by getting your staff to face these issues it in turn develops their skills. In order for your staff to be confident about making these decisions you must have the right culture in place. That is firstly to allow them to make decisions and not be afraid of making mistakes; and secondly a culture which support risk management so decision making can be shared across the management team and moves away from blaming individuals. Having the kind of culture which supports this kind of decision making will give you a real competitive advantage.

The other area is the strength of your culture. One of the major growth inhibitors is not getting enough of the right kind of people together with the time taken to integrate them  into your business to become fully productive. Having a strong culture creates what I have termed a cultural wall it works like this.

A company'as cultural wall uses a strong culture to ensure that only those potential employees who align with your culture will stay with the company. Those who are not fully committed or are trying to change it will bounce off the wall. That is either deliberately not join or leave soon after joining. Those who align with your culture will cross the wall and feel protected. This affinity leads to significantly lower attrition and a quicker absorption of new staff bringing them up to full productivity quicker, not to mention the increased likelihood of staff putting in more effort and extra hours into something to which they feel fully committed. 

By contrast those organisations with a weak or poorly developed culture suffer from inherently higher attrition as left unchecked people develop pockets of competing cultures, which results in a generally high level of attrition, and an increased chance that new employees will take longer to get up to speed. 

It should be obvious from the above how important Culture is to a business, the quicker companies get to grips with this the better their chance of longer term high growth.

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business , Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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Taking Your Business to the Gym – Resolving Decision Overload

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Decision overload condition, as I have described in an earlier article Recognising Decision Overload is simply where the business owner becomes so swamped by the amount of decisions and tasks he has to complete that it stops the business in its tracks.  This condition is often created by the business owner inadvertently training their staff that w

hen they come up against a problem, their best and/or safest course of action is not to make a decision, but, refer it to the business owner.

Having created, albeit unknowingly, this vicious circle the question is how do we create a virtuous circle?

The first step is to understand why business owners end up there in the first place. Often it’s because of the business owners lack of understanding that he shouldn’t attempt provide solutions for every problem, and second decision making should be “Fit for Purpose” and should not involve “gold plating the bathroom taps”. That is, don’t use a £100,000 a year man to make decisions on issues that can easily be made by a person paid £20,000 a year.

So how can this be achieved? The first step is to stop enforcing the vicious circle. Allow staff to make decisions. So when a member of staff says “I’ve got this problem; what do I do?” don’t rush to tell them but respond with “what do you think you should do?” Initially this will be met by a blank stare or even a look of amazement, but, fear not, this is the most important step. You could follow this up with  “why don’t you go away and think about it for a bit and come back with some ideas and we can talk about which one is best”

Initially it is going to make things a little harder and slow down overall decision making but it is critical to allowing you to work your way out of a job and to allow your staff to fill it. Once over the initial shock you’ll be surprised how quickly some of your staff will learn to take decisions. This is a difficult area for many business owners as firstly; they are uncomfortable delegators and secondly; are perfectionists (often confused with control freaks, although they can be that too) and expect that staff will make all the same decisions as they would. This won’t happen they will make more mistakes than you the owner; they may not be quite as good decisions but the additional time gained by the business owner in delegating these decisions will more than make up for these additional interventions.

Image by West Virginia Blue via FlickrThis simple act of delegation and management can be enormously liberating. I can quote a number of occasions where just applying this process has transformed the performance of small businesses. It has freed the owner from almost unbearable stress and allowed him to concentrate on issues more deserving of his attention and transformed employee from mere jobsworths’ to committed and hugely valuable assets.

Exigent Consulting specialises in providing Business Turnaround, Sales, Marketing and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business.

Taking Your Business to the Gym – Recognising Decision Overload

The activity that most business owners find the most difficult is managing staff in particular delegating responsibility.  Firstly owners need to understand that the most if not all their staff see working for a living as a way of earning a living at not as most business owners see it as a calling. They are not going to work long hours of overtime for nothing or commit wholly to a business in which they don’t have a stake; nonetheless they have skills which are often overlooked by Owners. It is also fair to say at this point that most independent businesses owners are not professional managers and have no experience of managing people.

A typical scenario is asking your staff to undertake a task and then deciding that they’re not doing the way you’d do it and either take it back entirely or get so involved with it that the staff member feels like you now own it.  If this happens regularly then you the business owner are making the situation work by inadvertently training his staff to recognise that he is the solution to any problem. After all why make a decision on something that the boss may disagree with – better, don’t make a decision at all and pass it back to the boss. The result, the business owner gets more overloaded and ends up making decisions on all sorts of matters in which the business owner shouldn’t be involved. The result is increasing frustration on behalf of the owner who’s under pressure and now on a shorter fuse leading to more reinforcement to the staff that their best course of action is to leave it to the boss diverting yet more decisions and creating a paralysis in the business. This is what I call the decision overload condition, where simply the business owner becomes so swamped by the amount of decisions and tasks he has to complete that it stops the business in its tracks.  

This condition is surprisingly common in owner managed businesses, and is often allowed to develop because owners are interested in progressing the business, well naturally and that because when they started they did everything they lose the understanding of the relationship between the job or activity and the market price for a person doing that job. By way of an example I was with a company owner who insisted on doing the route planning for his collection vehicles, his argument was that his staff couldn’t do it as well as he did.   My response was to ask him would he pay somebody a salary similar to his (it was high five figures) to run route planning.

 “Don’t be silly” he said “of course not I’d only pay about £25,000.”

“Then why” I asked “are you insisting on doing that job when you pay yourself almost 4 times the going rate. Doesn’t that mean your expectations are based on someone massively over qualified for the job at hand? Its no wonder you’re so overworked, what other jobs do you do that your over-qualified for?

You know I could almost hear the clank as the penny dropped.

Like an addiction, acceptance is the first step to a cure, but this is the subject of another article.

Exigent Consulting specialises in providing Business Turnaround, Sales, Marketing and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business.