Act Now! 6 Steps to Minimize Growing Pains as You Scale

Marcus Wilson, Client Cultivator and Founder of Pivotal Impact Consulting, puts it well. “Imagine working in a company where everyone in the organization understands how their role contributes to the overall success of the company, where employees can learn and grow into a more skilled, engaged, and productive workforce, and where teams can deliver value faster while focusing on resident satisfaction and sentiment. These are the results you want when scaling.”

Here are the 6 steps Marcus recommends that you take to ensure growing and scaling happens smoothly:

1. Communicate Purpose and Strategy  

A company that scales well communicates its strategy and purpose continuously to all levels of the organization, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and that you have buy-in for the company's mission and vision. With a solid purpose and strategy, you can inspire and motivate your teams to work toward a common goal.  

The company’s leadership team should take every opportunity to reiterate why they are here and what they are trying to do as a business, collectively. When you begin to scale operations, employees are going to want to know what direction you are going as a business and how it will impact them overall.

Not communicating your business’ purpose and strategy effectively can result in a lack of direction, ineffective decision-making, missed opportunities to grow and expand, an inefficient use of resources and a lack of employee engagement.

In order to communicate well, consider these tips:

• Use clear and concise language: Avoid using jargon or technical terms that people may not understand. Use simple language that everyone can understand.
• Use stories and examples: Use real-life examples to show how the purpose and strategy can be applied in everyday situations.  
• Be transparent: Explain the reasoning behind the decisions made and provide clear evidence to support them.  
• Encourage feedback: This will help identify any issues or concerns that need to be addressed.  
• Celebrate successes: Celebrate successes along the way to achieving the purpose and strategy. This will help motivate people to continue working towards the common goal.  

2. Create a Culture that Embraces Change

Culture will impact the mindset of an organization. In return, the mindset of an organization will influence your team’s willingness to adapt to change and learn new skills. Establishing a strong and stable culture within the workplace can be challenging. Leaders often struggle with maintaining group cohesion and collaboration while also supporting individual growth, especially as the business grows.

In order to foster a culture that embraces change as you scale you must:

• Create an environment where employees feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas about change.  Encourage them to voice their concerns and provide feedback.
• Equip employees with the tools and resources they need to adapt to change.  This can include training, coaching and mentoring programs to help employees navigate the transition.
• Ensure that you have a strong team in place that is aligned with your company's mission and vision. Hire the right people with the skills and experience to support growth and adapt to change.
• Leaders should model a positive attitude towards change and be transparent about the reasons for it. This can help alleviate anxiety and build trust among employees.
• Encourage employees to embrace a growth mindset and view change as an opportunity to learn and expand their responsibilities. This can be achieved through an education and training program.
• Give employees a sense of ownership and control over the change process. This can be achieved through involvement in decision-making, task forces, or other change management initiatives.  

3. Invest in Employees

We hear a bit of pushback when it comes to investing in the future of your teams. “What if I invest in training my employees and they leave?” To which we would say, “What if you don’t invest in training and they stay?” Ultimately, the last thing you want to do when it comes to training your employees is nothing.

There are 3 core training areas that will benefit your teams and business: technical, professional and soft skill training. Technical training will enable teams to use tools, software, equipment and techniques so they can do their job well. Professional training will provide employees with skills in problem-solving, teamwork, time management, and critical thinking so they can excel in their career. Soft skill training can include communication, negotiation, conflict resolution and relationship-building, which will improve overall job performance and interpersonal connections among your staff and with your residents.

Aside from reducing turnover and helping you retain top talent, your teams are the hands and feet of your organization. Ensuring they are set up for success will only add to the success of your business as you scale and grow. ‍

4. Foster Innovation and Continuous Improvement

As you encourage your teams to share feedback, it’s important to foster innovation by encouraging them to share their ideas. When innovative ideas are brought to the table, you can evaluate whether it might result in an improvement for your residents and/or stakeholders. Some ideas might seem radical or unfeasible, but some might be an opportunity to try something new that benefits the overall community and business.  

Encouraging employees to think outside the box will reap many benefits. On a micro-level, it can increase employee’s engagement and overall work satisfaction leading to more productivity. At a macro-level, it could be the reason your properties run better and stronger than before. Win-win!

5. Adopt an Agile Mindset

In response to fostering innovation and continuous improvement, having an agile mindset as leaders allows the company to be more flexible and adaptable to changing market conditions and customer needs. With this mindset, you’ll help properties to respond quickly when new opportunities and challenges arise so you can adjust your strategies as needed. Not only are you creating an environment that encourages new ideas, but also improving operations as you grow and scale while further establishing a culture of trust and open communication with your teams.

To adopt this in your business, be willing to quickly follow through with new ideas that make sense! Emphasize the importance of collaboration, experimentation, and feedback as you implement those valuable ideas. Keep the focus on delivering value to residents and stakeholders. Be willing to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity as opportunities for growth or innovation come up.  

6. Leverage Technology to Optimize Operations

You are no stranger to constraints like overtime, budgets and staffing. This is where technology covers a lot of gaps. As you see in your day-to-day operations, technology can automate repetitive tasks, reduce errors, and streamline processes, which can help businesses operate more efficiently and effectively.  

However, we often see teams get a little jumpy with technology, running to the “next best thing” without fully evaluating and leveraging the full features and capabilities of their current software providers to solve for their setbacks. Lots of teams are using, at best, 50-60% of their tech stacks’ full offerings. As you scale, consider sitting down with your software providers to see what operational improvement opportunities you might be missing out on.  

All in all, you should be making every attempt to automate or centralize as much of your business as possible, especially as you grow. Automations will take care of the heavy lifting and tedious tasks while giving back time for your teams to focus on creating and adding value to your residents and your community.  

Interested in learning more about how to more effectively grow and scale your organization? Visit http://www.pivotalimpactllc.com/

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