Yesterday, I had a wonderful text exchange with an up-and-coming leader in AI at a Fortune 5 company. This Director hoped to start executive coaching in the coming weeks because their world just exploded. They told me that in the last 6 months, they have now had 10x the budget and 5x org growth.
We are scheduled to chat next week, and if this leader is like others I have worked with, we will spend our time on how to scale fast and still keep the organizational culture intact.
How does one SCALE CULTURE? Three things to focus on, the 3 P’s:
1) PRINCIPLES. One of my current clients at a different Fortune 5 company is a great example here (she rocks!). She, too, inherited a much bigger team than she had had previously. We worked on a 90-day plan that included clear principles. She chose:
- Service to the customers
- Remember, our customer is both the end customer as well as our Sellers
- Ownership of the business
- Be proactive
- Solve problems
- Be 1% better every day
- Commitment to the team
- Proactively support & help each other
- Over-communicate & in a timely manner
She not only coaches to these principles daily with her Directs, she also utilizes these principles in recruiting. One practice I really like: When recruiting internal candidates, she calls a candidate’s boss right away. She shows the boss the principles and asks if the candidate is up to the task. Often, the boss says they’re not because the standard is high. This allows her to move on to a different candidate who IS up to the task.
2) PROCESSES. I am attached to dashboards. I am agnostic when it comes to what type because there are scads. Dashboards should make clear your top initiatives over a year’s time. And one of those initiatives should be culture health. Like, “how do we ensure people can connect regularly even though we are primarily remote?”
3) PEOPLE. The hardest aspect about scaling is letting go of being able to see your skips and their skips regularly, adding to that gnawing feeling you really don’t know what’s going on. You don’t….entirely….and that’s ok.
You gotta trust your folks. There’s the skill of “practical” letting go: delegation gets easier the more you do it!
And there’s the art of “psychological” letting go. I didn’t give up “control” of all that was going on in my biz until I had a kid. Well, that was 19 years ago, so it’s been a while since I have heard all that is going on. I hire the best coaches and trust them to do their job. If they have issues, they’ll come to me to problem solve.
