You are sitting around the leadership table talking about what is holding the company back. Operations sees one problem. Sales sees another. Finance has its concerns. Someone thinks the company needs better people. Someone else thinks it needs better systems.
Before you read on, ask yourself this question.
None of them is necessarily wrong. That’s what makes it difficult.
Each person is looking at the business from where they sit, seeing something that is real and trying to solve it. You can have capable people working hard on legitimate problems and still not be working on the same problem.
Ask each person on your leadership team, separately.
What is the biggest thing holding this company back right now?
Then listen.
If the answers are different, don’t rush to decide who is right. First ask why people responsible for leading the same company are seeing it differently.
What looks like a list of separate problems may be something else.
A company can start treating every symptom as its own problem.
A new system gets considered.
A new person gets hired.
A new process gets created.
Another initiative gets started.
Each may make sense on its own.
If you haven’t stepped back far enough to understand what is underneath the problems you’re seeing, you can spend a lot of time fixing things without fixing what is actually holding the company back.
The differences in your leadership team’s thinking are worth paying attention to.
Your operations leader sees what is happening in the field. Your sales leader sees what is happening before the work is won. Finance sees what happens to the numbers after decisions have been made. You see the whole company and the pressure coming from customers, employees and the future you are trying to build.
Those views are all useful, but they don’t automatically add up to a shared understanding of the business.
That becomes more important as the company grows.
When you were smaller, you could often carry enough of the business in your own head to connect the pieces. You knew the people, the customers, the jobs, the decisions and the problems. You could walk down the hall, ask a question and get to the answer.
At some point, that stops working.
It isn’t that you stopped being capable. The company just became too large and too complex for one person’s view to hold everything together.
I’ve been there. I’ve built and led growing companies, and I’ve learned that one of the hardest parts of growth isn’t recognizing that something needs to change. It’s figuring out what needs to change first. Then getting the people responsible for the business to see it clearly enough to move.
That becomes harder when everyone is consumed by today’s business.
Customers need answers.
Jobs need attention.
People need decisions.
Cash needs to be managed.
Problems need to be solved.
The next project has to be won and the current one has to be delivered.
Those aren’t distractions from the business. They are the business.
But they can consume every bit of leadership attention you have.
Running today’s business is not the same job as building tomorrow’s business.
Tomorrow requires somebody to step back and ask where the company is going. What it will need to do then that it cannot do today, and what must change before that becomes a problem.
If nobody has that responsibility, tomorrow gets pushed behind today’s most urgent problem.
Today’s problems will always win. That’s one of the hardest transitions in growth.
The entrepreneurial company can often succeed because the founder sees the whole picture, makes the connections, makes the calls and keeps things moving. That way of operating may have been exactly what the company needed to get where it is.
The company has now reached a stage where the way its pieces work together has to change.
The leadership team must be able to look at the business together. They need to determine what actually matters, decide what needs attention now and what can wait, and make sure someone owns what happens next.
It doesn’t mean everyone has to agree.
If two leaders see the same situation differently, the company needs to understand why before it decides what to do about it. Sometimes the difference is information or it’s perspective. Sometimes it exposes a decision that was never clearly made. And often the CEO has to make the call.
What matters is that the decision gets made, ownership of the outcome is clear, and the organization moves.
That is what changes when a company grows. The company no longer needs one person to hold the whole picture together.
It needs a leadership team capable of seeing the business together, deciding what matters, and leading what comes next.
The next time your leadership team sits around the table talking about what is holding the company back, listen differently. Don’t just listen to the answers.
Listen for whether you’re all describing the same business. Growth eventually asks more of a company than more revenue, more people and more work.
It asks the company to become something different.
And when the company changes, the way it is led must change with it.
Who owns tomorrow?
I’ve got a question I’d like you to ask your leadership team.
And I mean ask them individually, not around the conference table.
Ask each of them: “What’s the biggest thing holding this company back right now?”
Then listen to the answers.
Don’t help them.
Don’t give them choices.
And don’t tell them what you think the answer is.
Just listen.
Because here’s what I’ve learned about growing companies.
Sometimes… the most important thing you learn isn’t what the answer is.
It’s how different the answers are.
You may have one leader talking about people.
Another talking about systems,
Another about sales,
And yet another talking about margins.
And everybody may have a legitimate reason for saying what they’re saying.
That’s where it gets interesting.
Your see… if you have good people, working hard, looking at the same company and they’re seeing very different things, you may have learned something important about the business before you’ve fixed anything.
You may have discovered that the problem isn’t what you thought it was.
So try the question.
Ask everybody separately.
Then put the answers side by side.
What you learn from the differences may be more valuable than ANY ONE answer.
I’ve been thinking about what those differences mean for a growing company, and that’s what I’ve written about in this article.
Pat Alacqua is a business growth strategist and Amazon best-selling author of “Obstacles to Opportunity: Transforming Business Challenges Into Triumphs.” He helps leaders fix and prevent what growth breaks. If a version of this is sitting on your desk right now, a second set of eyes that has run a growing company can help you see it clearly. Reach out at PatAlacqua.com or Pat@PatAlacqua.com.
