This is the fifth post in a series Things I learnt while building my first company
Once you’ve navigated the initial whirlwind of starting up your company, and then stabilised the business, the next phase requires establishing a the infrastructure for resiliency and sustained performance and growth.
Becoming purpose driven
We had a number of attempts at creating a Vision and Mission in our early years, but none of them really stuck. We achieved a breakthrough when we appointed one of our senior people to research the domain, and present his findings to the company in a series of roadshows, followed by a series of facilitated workshops where we engaged the wider team, taking a design thinking approach that included everyone. I believed engaging our team in this way was critical to achieving buy in and developing something meaningful which stood the test of time, and was immensely helpful to set our ambition, and to help guide our strategy. It provided a key point of coherence that was often used as a filter for new initiatives which was helpful to distinguish whether ideas for new products and initiatives were well aligned before people spent too much time on them.
You can read a little more this approach in The Power of Purpose in Business
Clarifying Values and embedding culture
Our initial set of values, emerged really early on in the organisation, and were mainly driven by the founders, grounded in our shared beliefs in how to treat each other and other people and how to conduct business ethically, fairly and with responsibility to all stakeholders.
Given the success that we had with our purpose initiative, we decided to review our values in the same way. Appointing a senior People and Culture leader to review our values, in a participatory fashion with everyone in the organisation. This was immensely fun for the team to participate in and it was also a great success. We were very pleased to find that the result was highly aligned with the initial set of values we started with.
These values were kept front and centre in the company. You would find them front and centre in our recruitment advertisements, in our induction pack for all new employees, embedded into our culture survey, sprinkled through our presentation templates, added as categories to our internal shout out/kudos system so that they were re-enforced when peoples actions were celebrated. One of our staff members without any prompting even created an fictionalised illustration of our company espousing our values represented which we printed onto t-shirts and stickers and put on everyone’s laptops.
In my experience our values had a large part to play in directing the culture of the organisation and I could see a direct link between our espoused values and how we acted within the company on a daily basis.
A robust and inclusive strategy and planning cycle
Strategy in many enterprises often happens in a black box. It emerges from the CEO or from key strategy executives and can often seem foreign to the rest of the organisation. To achieve better buy in on organisational strategy and the companies direction, you need to expose the strategy process to a wider cohort in the organisation. In order to do this, I taught my approach to formulating a strategy to senior people in the organisation.
We did this over a number of strategy cycles, where I taught and guided my direct reports, the leaders of every division in the company, and the extended leadership team which also included some of our key contributors who were very influential people in the organisation my approach to diagnosis and strategy development. This drastically increased their capability in strategy development, created greater leadership bench strength, more succession options, while at the same time enabled them to further teach it to their teams.
You can read more about how I go about strategy in Crafting a Winning Strategy that Engages
A framework for Strategy Execution
One of the most important activities in keeping people engaged at the company is getting them engaged with the strategy of the business, we did this using the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework. This allowed us to cascade our strategy through the organisation, from enterprise wide to division to function to team to Individual. This created the link between all initiatives in the business to the overarching enterprise strategy. When using a framework like OKRs, you can empower your teams with their budgets and their initiatives safe in the knowledge that if something doesn’t fit, it will become obvious very quickly and the team can manage this on their own without intervention needed from management.
Establishing institutions
Institutions are bodies that you set up in your organisation that cut across departments and divisions. We created a number of institutions within our company to bring together various team members who were tasked with developing and progressing key capabilities within the business that we felt were imperative to innovation in our domain and our continued competitive advantage.
Starting institutions is not easy. They require strong leadership, care and curation, but once they are set up, they offer a strong and robust foundation in areas that you feel are imperative to the successful operation of your company in the longer term. The benefit of being cross division and department, means they are less affected by organisational restructures, which means that they can continue to operate towards their goal even while the organisation changes around them.
It is imperative to establish a clear charter for each institution within your organisation, to empower it with delegations, and also to embed its functions within your business processes.
An added benefit of establishing institutions within your business is that they allow for a wider cohort of team members to get engaged with important initiatives within the organisation and are often a great way to identify the next generation of leaders within the company.
In Summary
Establishing a self-managing organisation requires intentional effort. By clarifying our purpose, values, and culture, we created a strong foundation for decision-making and behaviour. Our inclusive strategy and planning cycle engaged our teams and empowered them to make decisions that aligned with our overall direction. Finally, establishing institutions within our company provided a robust framework for long-term success and innovation.
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