Obstacles to Growth: Difficulty Diagnosing the Real Problems
CEOs often ignore issues that don’t align with their beliefs or shut down conversations that feel like a threat to their area of expertise. Then employees stop sharing, which creates bigger problems in the future. Businesses that want to keep their people and want to grow, need to nurture different ideas.
Every experienced leader understands that having business relationships built on trust is imperative for success. Investigate the type of organizational communication in your company and learn how to embrace feedback, even when it’s not flattering.
Critical Questions To Ask
● Can the company articulate and define its problems?
● Is the leadership team intentional in their willingness to uncover problems?
● Does the CEO encourage dialogue around difficult issues?
● Is the CEO open to advice from outside sources?
How To Overcome This Challenge
The company needs to identify key success indicators and track them consistently. Take the subjectivity out of diagnosing problems. Instead, let real facts and figures tell the leaders what requires their attention. Here are a few questions to get you started:
● What are the key indicators that we track now?
● What additional key indicators should we track and report?
● Who needs to know about these key indicators?
● How should we provide this information to employees?
The ability to involve every employee in this process will help open up a dialogue, bring people together and come up with a solution. Try doing the following to improve your decision-making processes:
● Monthly company and team staff meetings
● One-on-ones
● Key indicators to take the emotion out of problems
● Profit planning
● Cash flow management
● Anonymous organizational development surveys
● Unifying events for employees
As the complexity of an organization increases, it’s even more critical that the leader has a handle on the health of the company. Financial statements and other documentation only supply the information to what happened in the past, you need to be looking into the future.
The awareness of the real problems inhibiting growth begins with leadership’s philosophy on how to effectively communicate and deal with challenges. If you can create an environment of trust where conversations get to the heart of an issue promptly, your company will start growing naturally.
Need help with navigating business growth or leadership coaching? Contact Mission Critical Teams.
