A Tree Grows in Fremont

While working with various client organizations and been engaged with companies of varying maturity and size, when poised with the question – “what are those 3-Factors which can impact any growing organization”, it nails down to

  • People,
  • Talent Management,
  • Decision making Capabilities,

My parameter of “growing organization” is not only revenues, profits, or any other vanity metrics but also organizations which has learned to Fail and improved. Ultimately, any business is about Clients, Profits, Revenues and Resources but when you think little deep on the internal factors (something which you feel you can control), I would like to list down the factors in following Order:

Factor#1: Organization Culture

I am sure all of us find each organization unique. Each enterprise has its own DNA which it utilizes to create a Right Environment – filled with positive energy, people as focus, transparent communication and enabling people with voice. (Rants & Criticism are not controlled in North-Korea way)

Making an Organization BIG is science but building a Great Organization is an Art. If you have a strong culture to draw and represents, as artists you could do wonders – easily draw right values of your organization on a white canvas and build something beautiful for community to learn, observer and share.

Focus on Organization Culture helps you build and protect your own identity. It’s no marketing, but any energy spent on building and protecting your culture helps you establish a brand lot sooner.

Ultimate test of Right Culture : Easy to spot non-reluctant people doing their job with Happiness.

As a leader of Organization; does your initiative fail to complete most of times? Do you find your people non-participative or hear people-rants all-over? You don’t need another software solution to automate some of your problems or another salary hike in already dwindling economy but a careful watch at your *Culture* – something which you have either built over a period of time or carried a baton which was given to you.

It is very difficult to protect and build a great culture in organization but once paved a great culture, it does wonder to the growth of organization. Numbers are always relative and milestones are bound to be either achieved or missed; but great culture propagates an environment where people do not hesitate accepting mistakes, believe in learning thru failures and most importantly sharing the failure making it as learning milestone. Faster a failure, more is learning; higher the magnitude of share – more viral it is. All of this and more can only be achieved where you build a culture propagating leadership, accountability and ownership.

Factor#2: Initiatives called Internal-Innovation

In the world that I live in; Innovation is already a cliché. I have heard almost everyone talking about Innovation as Core for future growth. At the first place, Innovation impacts the growth (enough already known) but why Innovation is an internal factor?

Consider a situation that tomorrow a new Startup comes into scenario and thru their capabilities becomes a threat to your company (as a new startup delivers awesome service at very low cost and create Huge value for its people and customer). In short, Innovation gives a capability and huge leading advantage in market. So, as a team and with some success in the past we start living in the world of “Initiatives” and the best we would do to counter that new startup is to have set of initiatives. With time and growth, we create a structures, boxes and everything cushioning around us – rather getting ignorant about our par-excellence. This is *this focus of excellence which we miss.

If as a team we start competing in collaboration, in spirits, we could do wonders. After all there are only few who are doing rocket science. This mechanism of identifying what needs to be done for this internal collaboration is internal-innovation.

Running on a treadmill for healthy heart is good, but joining the herd of “Run-on-The –Mill” companies is a slow heart-attack. Trust your people, have faith in their learning capabilities, and above all give room to do experimentation without fear of failure.

Factor#3: Discipline

Discipline in anything and everything that you do. It brings the predictability in your activities and hence results. Discipline is not only limited to Reviews, Short Meetings, Focused Discussions, Knowledge Sharing sessions, Conflict Management but also to overall Administration is important.

I chose to keep it little more generic and not using the term Financial, or Delivery, or Sales just to indicate that anything that is done (read activity) in growing organization has to be very disciplined. Now, this is directly linked to being Accountable to the activity to which you are exposed to.

Accountability is always seeded, not hired.

No one can predict future or forecast right numbers, but if you have built platform where people are self-motivated, passionate herd – accountable enough – gives a factor of being disciplined and sail thru any situation at hand. This is firmly on the belief that, every problem has a solution. Cash Flow, Hiring, Talent management etc can be a problem for immediate, short term or long term basis – but looking at the whole is more important than parts – solutions can be symptomatic or it could directly address a core; this completely depends on the factors and situations at hand.

What Top-3 factors you think is impacting your organization/industry?

Thank You.