John Bradberry — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 16:21:34 GMT

Great points above. Personalizing business is a powerful principle (often overlooked) for businesses at all stages of growth, and I agree that it becomes more challenging in more mature businesses. A couple of thoughts . . . The challenges that come with growth put an even greater premium on developing the right practices and laying the right ‘tracks’ while the business is still small and the clay is still moist. Most managerial dysfunctions originate not because of growth per se, but from ineffective seed-stage habits that increase in scale and impact over time.
Each early stage conversation (or non-conversation) sets a tone for what the future company will look and feel like. An example comes to mind where a founder was confiding in me (an advisor) of concerns about her CFO not pulling his weight, but she was not having the tough conversations necessary to confront him on his contribution. She was avoiding the awkward conversations (the ones she most needed to have) and like any founder she could lift a hundred ‘priority’ tasks in front of this uncomfortable one. Extend this pattern over time and you end up with a 200-person firm where you get the real ‘skinny’ through the grapevine and in backrooms but not in meetings, which have evolved into dilbertesque charades. Nobody plans it this way. It’s the natural extension of thousands of smaller choices to engage or to not engage people on the things that matter. On the positive side, the simple ways of connecting with employees and partners that work in small firms will take on even more power in larger firms as long as they are consistently practiced and evaluated for impact.

It does take time—lots of it—and I guess with growth there are more opportunities for mgmt. teams to invest less time in creating emotional alignment and more time to the crises du jour that stream and scream toward the business.

I have seen one leader in particular maintain, even strengthen, a culture of emotional attachment and alignment among employees (in a business that grew from a blank sheet of paper to a 600 person business in 4 years). His solutions were (1) investing his personal time in these efforts. He “bucketed” his calendar into 4 basic activities, one of which was communicating, developing people, building the culture, etc., and he spent a good 25-30 percent of his time on these activities in a disciplined way. He was able to invest at this level only because of the high level of talent he brought onto his management team—they ran most aspects of the day-to-day biz allowing him to focus on people, talent, strategy, markets, etc. (2) the business also cultivated important rituals to build and feed emotional attachment. The business paid for professionally photagraphed portraits of all headquarters employees’ children and loved ones. In addition to giving copies of these to the employees, the framed portraits were all hung together along a prominent hallway in the headquarters building. This became a touchstone of the culture and added a lot of perspective a depth to interactions in the building. That may sound like a corny example (it was one of set of consistent practices), but you could see the fire in the eyes of people who worked at this firm—just as you can see the vacant eyes of so many people who show up and go through the motions in too many workplaces.

I didn’t intend for this to be so long… hope it adds value to the discussion.

Found+READ: Comments by John Bradberry