Last week I posted the first in a series of posts about my startup experience with Get Satisfaction. The first post focused on hiring and was appropriately the first in the series because hiring decisions will make or break your company.
However, it doesn’t stop there and once you have a team of smart capable professionals you have to create an organization structure that breaths and grows with them as the team accomplishes key objectives and develops an operational cadence around key business metrics.
2) Dynamic organizational structure: Not everyone will scale with the company and an essential strategy for accommodating and driving growth is continual reorganization. At Get Satisfaction we should have done more of this, moving people around as we grew and then pairing up different teams to accomplish specific objectives.
An example is that Marketing was inexorably linked to the enterprise sales demand gen requirements and while that would never go away the fact remains that other parts of the business suffered as that focus became all encompassing. In retrospect it would have been advantageous to pair marketing with a different team each quarter and set an an objective improvement in a key metric not related to demand generation, for example, working with customer support with the singular goal of improving customer communication efficacy.
As a company grows the requirements placed on individual leaders change and not everyone will make the shift so deliberate transition into different roles or out of the company is something that has to be planned. This isn’t a reflection of people failing but rather succeeding and the new demands evolving as a result.
Dynamic organizations reflect this by moving leaders into different roles not as a reaction to what is happening on the ground but as a forward motion intended to create progress in a new and emerging area. Successful startups move early executives into new roles frequently, not in an effort to sideline them but rather take advantage of their unique skills and organization knowledge to advance an area that would otherwise stagnate.
I am taken aback by how much time should be devoted to team and people issues in a startup, for a company like GS I would say at least 1/2 of the CEOs time needs to be spent on managing this and recruiting the best people for the challenges that are currently being experienced and what lays ahead. Once you have a team of good people you need to continually optimize that for business results but also change it up keep the people you have operating at peak intellectual engagement and interest.
Part of the challenge with “the best people” is that they don’t neatly fit into the existing organization structure, and the other part is that everyone has a sweet spot of company phase that they thrive in. I am a good example of this, very large companies are soul crushing for me, the overburdened process and gravity to inertia absolutely deflates me, yet the pure play startup is equally outside my comfort zone because I don’t bring tools that are well honed for business creation. I am a best fit for a company with presence, a reasonably complete product, and customer assets, in other words growth stage or on the precipice of a growth stage buildout.
Creating organization structures for people based on their capabilities rather than your org chart and recognizing where people thrive and where they outlive their utility is essential.
Equally critical for dynamic organizations is to decentralize decision making to the nodes of the organization. This is no small challenge for companies that achieve mass after having slogged through a startup period that is an all-hands exercise. Top down decision making results in critical time lost and decisions that are inexorably compromised in order to satisfy the personalities of the team rather than the outcomes that is desired. You hire smart professionals who have, ideally, good judgment and intellectual capacity, why not lead them by getting out of the way and letting them do the jobs they were hired to do rather than managing indecision as a result of people not measured by the specific outcomes affecting the strategy and tactics required to get there?
(Cross-posted @ Venture Chronicles)
Startup Lessons: Dynamic Org Structures is copyrighted by Jeff Nolan. If you are reading this outside your feed reader, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.
Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.