Growing up isn’t always easy. If you remember your teenage years, you’ll know that navigating the period between your carefree youth, when everything was new and exciting, and adulthood, when you’re more mature and self-assured, can be rocky. Everything you thought you knew gets turned on its head, you have a whole new set of problems to worry about, and the decisions you make begin to carry more weight.
Most businesses experience a version of “organizational adolescence”. It’s a period of adjustment that all successful companies must pass through if they’re to move from start-up to grown-up and, just like real-life adolescence, it’s a time when many companies struggle.
The good news is organizational adolescence is just a phase, but how you navigate that phase will have a lasting impact on your business. The key to a smooth transition from start-up to grown-up is identifying and resolving the signs of organizational adolescence early and effectively. To that end, here are a few major indicators of organizational adolescence to watch out for.
Founder-Fatigue
In the early days of your business, your team is small and nimble. Everyone knows each other and understands what they have to do to help the business succeed. As the Founder, you are typically embedded within the team. You have a great relationship with your employees and are consulted on all things. People will ‘go to the mat’ for you and in many ways, you are the ‘keeper of company culture’.
But as the company grows, you start to feel out of your depth. You’re still being consulted on everything, but you no longer have all the answers. New issues arise that you have no experience—or interest—in dealing with. You find yourself stuck doing tasks you never envisioned such as hiring, people management, payroll and budgeting. You’re caught up in the day-to-day minutia of running a business and are no longer able to focus on driving the company forward. You begin to yearn for ‘simpler times’ and long for a return to the work you love doing.
Growing Pains
A growing team means you are no longer able to maintain a relationship with every employee. This can lead to a lack of clear communication and guidance, which in turn leads to a disgruntled team. Employees aren’t always clear on what ‘doing the right thing’ looks like, problems are overlooked, and things begin to fall through the cracks.
Your office manager is no longer able to juggle reception, manage social media, set up new employees, and do your expenses. You recognize the need for specialists in different business areas including finance, operations, IT, legal, and human resources, but none of them require full-time support just yet.
As the staff become diversified and specialized, more standardized processes are required for everything from policies and procedures and employee evaluations to org charts and contracts. Support for high performers becomes crucial as the workload increases, and management for junior staff is necessary to keep people on track.
Culture Shock
You’ve probably stumbled once or twice on a hire that didn’t work out and have been contemplating what exactly makes someone a good fit for your company these days. On top of this, you begin to experience push-back from legacy staff who feel like things ‘aren’t the same anymore’. Your company used to be a place that no one ever left, but now the ‘family’ isn’t as cohesive and attrition rates are on the rise. Leadership is lamenting for the days when people ‘just did what they needed to do’ to get things done. Now there’s talk of overtime, pay increases, and promotions and you suddenly need to worry about a retention strategy for your high-performers.
Bit by bit, it feels like the company you’ve poured all your time and energy into is becoming unruly. You know you need to fix things but you’re not sure where to even start.
Where Do You Go From Here?
Don’t panic! Organizational adolescence is simply another phase that every successful company must pass through before it can grow to a more mature and complex level of operation. Yes, it can be a difficult time, but with the right level of support and planning your company can not only get through its adolescence, it can thrive.
Now that you know some of the signs to watch out for it’s time to ask yourself, “has my business reached adolescence yet?” If the answer is yes, you might benefit from the support of people who have been there before.
At BeachHead, we have made a career of helping small companies move into the next stage of their growth. Our Organization Audit gives business owners a comprehensive understanding of their strengths and weaknesses as well as a deeper understanding of the current state of their entire business operation. Click here to find out more about what an Organization Audit is and what it can do for you.
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