Ep 11 - How to Keep Your Organization Flat When Business is Growing

Power Up Your Team Podcast

It’s easy to wind up in a complex organization when business is growing fast. You are hiring more people and have started to define specific roles and departments to keep things organized.

But how do you keep the entrepreneurial spirit and agility of your team?

This is episode 11 of Power Up Your Team podcast. Today I want to give you three tips to keep your organization simple and flat.

1. Build Transparency into The Work

Help your team understand the business beyond their immediate tasks. Educate them on the key steps between identifying your next client and delivering your service.

Each team member needs to have clarity on how their specific work fits into the bigger picture and requires more communication about what’s happening outside their immediate role.

That positions them to navigate the organization themselves instead of escalating every question or issue up to their manager.

People can operate in a flat structure when they understand the big picture which includes:

· Clear articulation of where you want to be in 1 – 5 years

· Approach you are taking to get there

· Measurements indicating you are heading in the right direction

Check out episode 5 where I talk about vision statements and the measurements that help make them real.

2. Create Autonomy So Your Team Can Make Decisions
Instead of making all decisions yourself, let people lead a decision-making process that you defined.

Start with simple day to day decisions such as waiving late fees, changing team members on a project or creating and delivering a sales proposal.

Explain all considerations that go into making decisions and delegate them step by step so you can help people stretch into new responsibilities. Check out episode 8 where I discuss that moving into the CEO role is a process and not an event.

Invest in professional development and training for your staff. To do their job well, they need to have

· good understanding of the business

· tools and resources to perform their work

· access to information so they can make good decisions.

Ensure team members can cover for each other so that there is no single point of failure.

3. Develop Real-Time Feedback Mechanisms

You have been measuring business metrics such as revenue or profit margin all along. They are telling you what has happened in the past. You are looking in the rear-view mirror.

It’s time to assess quality and timelines of work as it happens.

And here is an important mindset shift for you to take on:

You are developing these metrics so your team can be successful.

They need to have a collective understanding how services for your clients are coming together. Examples: Lead time for a quote or time to respond to a customer request.

Set the expectation that metrics are reviewed frequently and give your team permission to make changes to improve the work.

Read on at www.Powerupyourteam.com/11