Let’s first assume that you have a product or service that solves a problem, delights your customers and you know how to market it. I could write three different articles on those issues alone and there are others out there that would do a better job of it.
The issues I’m writing about today are just as important, but there is a lack of relevant information about them and how they are interrelated. For 14 years, I have been setting up and leveling up operations for startups to the Fortune 50. The top three reasons I see companies missing their growth targets are:
You aren’t tracking the right data to make informed decisions
Functional misalignment is requiring too much collaboration across teams
Your staff doesn’t know what your growth goals are and the part they play in achieving them
We love to talk about data and its critical importance in making informed business decisions, but I have found that most leaders don’t know what data to track and how often to track it. They also don’t know the critical role organization design plays in enabling the tracking and utilization of that data.
If you are relying on data from your P&L or customer satisfaction ratings to drive your business decisions, this is causing you to make decisions too late. You are looking at data from a point in the past and you’ve already lost your opportunity to get in front of a customer-related problem. You must be tracking lead indicators in order to catch a downward trend early enough to make an impact before it’s too late. If you want to learn more about how to do this, I recommend reading “The Four Disciplines of Execution” by Sean Covey and Chris McChesney.
Functional misalignment is when the functions of your organization are not designed properly to work together. Think of them like gears in a clock that need to fit together just right in order to work. The problem is, unlike a clock, your business doesn’t just stop working when the functions aren’t aligned - and most of the time you miss what’s really happening.
In order for sh*t to get done when your functions aren’t aligned, your staff has to collaborate more. Collaboration requires more meetings, especially in a virtual environment. We all know meetings are a time suck and time is money. Now your team isn’t working on the most critically important items, because they have to spend too much time collaborating to get anything done. Are you surprised your growth goals are slipping?
Finally - do all of your staff know what your growth goals are, down to the contributor level? Prove it. Unless you have a formalized system of goal setting that decompresses those top-line growth goals down to the department level, how would your staff know that what they are working on at any given moment is going to achieve that goal?
It is amazing to me how many companies miss this when those that crush it in this area even democratize the way they do it - like GitLab. Please take a page out of their extremely detailed, freely available approach and put something like it in place now. Don’t start with OKRs, but you can use their framework to put some pretty simple goals in place fairly quickly. And PLEASE, trust that your people can handle the information and make your goals transparent across your organization.
To summarize, if you are starting to fall short of your growth goals - take a close look at the data you're using to make decisions, how much collaboration is required across your teams, and the transparency of your growth goals. Happy growing!