Diagnosing and Treating The Invisible

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 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 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.  Ingenuity would be reflected in R&D efforts to come up with a whole new 'slinky effect' for withstanding a significantly greater 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 Operating State Alignment Survey measures resilience and ingenuity. Get in touch with us to learn more.