In the final episode of Season one, Jenni explains how rapid growth in organisations can create chaos, why this happens and the six things you can do to fix it. With rapid growth comes the important window of opportunity to adapt, re-evaluate processes and ways of working which, if missed, results in toxic chaos. If you’re experiencing growing pains, Jenni gives you “freedom within a framework” to go from chaos to calm.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Leadership Alignment Tool – a diagnostic tool to help organisations refocus (previously called Panoptic)
Podcast – Chaos to calm: Employee engagement, employee experience and internal communication S1 E8
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast:
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with Jenni Field.
Today I’m going to be talking about organisational growth. I want to talk about the sort of chaos this creates and how you can start to fix things. So, in the next 15 minutes, we’ll talk about the sort of chaos we see when there is rapid growth in organisations. We’ll talk about why it occurs and the six things you can do to fix it.
Now, rapid growth can take many forms, and I’m not going to cover mergers and acquisitions today because they are a different topic when it comes to how organisations grow and fixing chaos there. But what I do want to talk about is the growth that can happen quite quickly and the growth that can happen as a result of maybe investment or changes in customer dynamics or other things that might be impacting your ability to grow. I know for many organisations, the pandemic has actually impacted them really positively, and they’re now growing at quite a pace, and with that growth comes a need to adapt to the changes, comes a need to look at your processes and all sorts of things that will be linking to some of that chaos and organisations that grow to maybe 20 people, then to a hundred people need to look at their ways of working, need to look at the opportunities and need to look at some of their processes. And what’s important here is that that opportunity, that window to have a look at how you change your processes and what you need to do is a window that that’s not to be missed. Because if we miss that window of opportunity when we’re growing. We then end up in absolute toxic chaos because we’re trying to undo things that have become so much part of the norm that things become even more chaotic. Now the tricky thing about growth is that you are looking at the whole organisation. So, what we need to make sure is that we’re very clear on what we’re refocusing on. Very clear about the areas and the order of which we’re going to be looking at things, and that’s why the Tool Panoptic was developed, we developed last year to help leaders refocus their organisational and work through things at pace to help them do that and I’ve popped a link in the show notes to Panoptic so you can find out more about that tool, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. Today is about that chaos in growth.
So, what does chaos look like when you are going through rapid growth?
So, it looks like leaders not knowing how to grow and that might sound like a bit of a loaded statement, but sometimes leaders or founders in organisations are experts in the field of that business. They’re experts in what the business is doing. They’re not experts in business or growth or organisations. So, if we don’t know how to grow, that can start to lead to elements of chaos. We might also see a challenge where time is having to be split in working on the business and working in the business. Now as the team grows, the team are looking to you as a leader to be working in the business with them, but you are having to split your time working on it and in it, and that can cause some friction and some issues in the organisation, you might be growing so quickly that you are having to hire people very quickly, and that can lead to making poor hiring choices. It can also have an impact on the people around, and you might have people going off with stress because the pace is too much. There could be, you know, people experiencing burnout. There could be lots of challenges there. You can also have chaos around people not working well together, hierarchically, and this is around people not knowing who makes decisions or where decisions can be made and not understanding how things kind of knit together in the organisation. We can also have a lack of transparency of business performance.
This is sometimes the case when you are growing an organisation and you want to make sure people are hearing all the good stuff, you know, we want to make sure people are with us and, and they’re hearing all the great stuff we are doing but that sometimes means that we’re not as transparent about what’s going on in the organisational as we need to be.
And then the last aspect of chaos, if you like, is leaders not doing what they say they will. This is something I say again and again that comes up again and again in different elements of chaos because that gap between saying and doing is so important. And again, when you’re going through growth, what happens is that you are pulled in so many directions that you might be forgetting that you’ve said you’re going to do that. There’s no malicious intent there, but sometimes things are slipping and things aren’t being followed through because of the pace of how things are moving. Now when it comes to diagnosing the root cause of some of these chaotic symptoms, the tool of choice has to be one-to-one interviews. Now we know we have surveys, we have focus groups, we have all sorts of tools to diagnose but when you’re going through growth, it has to be one-to-one, and this is because you’ve got to take the time to listen to people. There has to be that investment in listening to them to give them space to talk about how the growth is feeling, how it’s impacting their ability to work and how they feel about all the changes that are going on around them and you just won’t get that from a survey. And actually you could make a bad situation worse if you just send out a survey with a link for people to click on, then you are almost implying that it’s just a bit of a tick box exercise. So, surveys haven’t. Have a place in diagnosis, absolutely but if you are a 20, 60, a hundred person organisation, then one-to-one listening interviews will be the best way for you to get to the root cause of chaos much quicker. You can start to identify themes, you can identify things much, much, much quicker, and that’s just much easier for us to make sure people are feeling listened to. It kind of serves two purposes almost. People are feeling listened to and valued, as well as us getting the insight and information that we need.
The other thing I’ll say about organisations who are growing is that you have to be open to this listening element. So when you are a smaller business, things can feel much more personal. So with the clients that I work with, some of them are founders of organisations and some of them are managing directors of, of small businesses that may have been acquired and, and some of them are, you know, looking to sell their business. There’s lots of different organisations that we work with but it’s always quite personal for that leader, and that’s something to think about. So if you are a leader of your organisational and you might have founded your organisation, and I come in and tell you that things are really chaotic and that actually some of the things that you are doing and you have been doing for a number of years has contributed to that chaos, that’s an uncomfortable conversation for us to be in. And in honesty, sometimes when we start that conversation, people will bow out that discussion and say, look I can’t do this. I’ll come back in a couple of years and, and we’ll have a conversation then because we have to get underneath why that chaos is happening. And leaders will always have a role to play in fixing the chaos, but quite often have a role to play in creating it at the same time.
So how do we fix the chaos?
Well, there’s six things for us to think about.
The first one I’ve, I’ve sort of already covered. You’ve got to take people with you, so. It’s important that you take people with you when you’re looking to fix anything. But when you are in growth, it’s just so important because you’ll have people that might have been there for a really long time, and if you are suddenly growing the business or things are suddenly changing, you’ve got to help them understand why that’s happening you know, what’s the goal we are aiming for, and why are things changing? So that needs for some clarity around why things are happening is really important. Now, that said, you might not necessarily have certain things completely nailed down in terms of the strategy, which is our second point as to how we fix chaos, and that’s to focus on how you want people to feel.
So, in episode eight of this series, I talked about employee engagement, employee experience, and internal communication. And I also mention the four enablers of engagement in that podcast. One of those is strategic narrative. Now, when you’re going through rapid growth, you might not have a clear strategic narrative, and that’s okay because you will get one, it just might not feel like it at the moment, but where you might not have one, what you can do is focus on how you want people to feel. So, when we look at effective and impactful communication, often talk about the fact that you need to focus on what do you want people to know? What do you want people to do? How do you want people to feel? And if you’re going through quite a significant change, it was something I talked about a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic. If you’re going through a lot of change and significant upheaval, focus on how you want people to feel and work back from there. I want people to feel safe. Okay. How do we make people feel safe? Well, maybe we need to make sure that there’s clear signage. I’ll use the COVID-19 pandemic for this one, but maybe we need to make sure there’s clear signage about how things are cleaned. Okay, so therefore we need to do that because we can work back from how we want people to feel. I want people to feel valued. Okay, well how do we do that? Well, we need to make sure that we make time for them, and that line managers are doing one-to-one interviews or one-to-one meetings with people. Let just focus on the feel if that’s something that’s causing some chaos for you.
The third is process. So you have to start to put processes in place and I mentioned that there’s a window for this that’s ideal and that’s the bit you need to sort of be aware of. So. If you are at that tipping point at the moment, if you’re starting to see it, lots of chaos. You’re starting to see people maybe overlapping each other with the tasks that they’re doing and things feeling like there’s just kind of too much coming in. You might need to hire an operations manager to help you do this and, and sort that out so process is going to become your friend.
The fourth is equipping managers, so making sure that you are equipping managers with the skills to identify where people are off with stress or people are experiencing burnout so this is important for managers. It’s also important for the teams to have this skill really across all of them. If you’re a small organisation, you might not have a big hierarchy with lots of managers, so making sure everybody’s equipped with that skill is important. Now, equipping managers, equipping team members is sort of one side of dealing with stress and burnout, but you also have to look at what’s contributing to that from a business process. So, we can support individuals and we can help people, but we have to look at the business processes that could be impacting that and change them. So that’s the important, that has to be action linked to some of those things as well.
The fifth is what’s called a rasci. Now, some of you may be familiar with raci. I use a rasci, and this is the letters R-A-S-C-I, and they stand for responsible, accountable, support, consult and inform, and essentially what you want to have is those five columns along the top and then a list of tasks on the left hand side, and then you can plot names or departments into those different buckets. What’s important is that you’ve only got one person that’s responsible. You can’t have a whole department responsible. You can’t have several people responsible. There can only be one. And this is why this helps us address some of the chaos that’s coming from those issues in maybe hierarchy people working together. sixth and that’s because quite often if everyone is responsible, no one is responsible, so we have to be very clear in who is responsible, and that’s the doer, the responsible, who is responsible for this project or this task. Then you’ll have different people around that who are accountable. You’ll have people there that need to be consulted, and you’ll also have people that may be supporting that project or that piece of work but the rasci piece is something I come up to again and again and again as a, as a fix and as a solution for people that are experiencing some kind of rapid growth. Now, I should say this can be overused. I’ve worked in organisations where we had a rasci for everything, and it doesn’t apply to everything. So try it, test it, see if it can apply. It’s not to be used for everything, but certainly if you’ve got some big projects or you’ve got lots of chaos with people overlapping each other, this is a good solution to have a look at.
The sixth and final one is coaching for the founder or the leader. So this is a big one to invest in really, and I think it’s really important that you find the right coach for you. You know, it’s a personal choice. It has to be someone who challenges and supports you, but it has to be someone that can help you move things forward. So having a coach around the business side of things helps you stay on track and it helps you stay accountable and it’s something worth investing in early on as you start to look at the growth of your organisation. So if you are a leader and you are experiencing some of these growing pains, then some of the things I’ve listed there to help fix, that might go against some of your natural entrepreneurial instincts. There’s a bit of process in there. There’s the rasci and there’s some coaching. Now you don’t have to put so many processes in place that you can’t innovate. That’s not the point of this, but it’s about having freedom in a framework, that structure around things that helps your team come with you because it’s not just you anymore. You know, you need the people around you to make things a success, otherwise you wouldn’t have hired them. So, we have to make some changes to help us all work together and move forward.
Now this is the final episode of season one, and I’m currently exploring ideas around a season two. So, I’d love to hear from you if you have. Ideas or thoughts for another season or any feedback on this one. And if you are listening to me on Apple Podcasts, please don’t forget to rate and review as well. So all that’s left for me say is thank you as always for listening. It’s been a pleasure talking to you throughout this season and there are details in the show notes so you can stay in touch with me both on Twitter and LinkedIn.
