How CEOs Impair Sustainable Growth in Their Company
A business, like nature, tends to move through chaos during growth. Yet few CEOs understand how it affects the company and have a model that helps focus on driving profits, developing people and improving processes. What gets in the way of recognizing the patterns of growth and navigating their impact?
Diagnosing the apparent problem, not the real problem
If you address the wrong issues or fail to successfully address each challenge when it first appears, the company will have to continue to address the challenge until it successfully solves it. I heard a story about a woman who went to the doctor because she was having severe pain down her arm. He gave her pain killers and told her to avoid certain things and to do others. The pain didn’t go away, in fact, it spread to other areas. After looking underneath the surface, they found she had pinched vertebrae in her cervical spine, had surgery, and all the pain went away.
It’s common to throw resources or make snap decisions when so much is happening so quickly. Take time to find the cause. Diagnose the origin of the challenges going on with your people and processes.
Unable to predict what’s coming—beyond financials
It’s the surprise element that gets most owners and executives. When problems show up, predictability goes down and people lose confidence. Most entrepreneurs don’t have the level of predictability to forecast trouble spots before they surface. Even if you’ve been down the road before, each new company venture produces its own patterns and personalities that create unique challenges not seen before. Effective leaders have a view of at least 6 months ahead and a system for predicting a whole host of problems that are coming.
Try to solve problems by fixing them
Most business leaders are problem solvers. It’s in their nature to see parts that need to be fixed or changed. As a result, they rarely make decisions based on a perspective of the “whole” of their business. This condition blocks them from holding a deeper understanding of how the enterprise as a whole system functions. When you treat the whole system, the problems resolve themselves. Getting over a problem sometimes means thinking beyond the tyranny of “fixing the parts” to thinking about your business holistically.
We are here to teach you how to diagnose, predict and adapt to focus on the right things at the right time. Need help with navigating business growth or leadership coaching? Contact Mission Critical Teams.