Scaling Company Growth
Business lore is replete with stories of scrappy founders who, with a combination of moxie, grit and performing every single task themselves, built thriving enterprises. But what often gets missed in those stories of individual geniuses single-handedly doing every job in the company is that most leaders who successfully scaled had to, at some point, learn to let go and delegate.
Letting go doesn’t come easy to high-performing founders, executives or leaders; many hard-charging leaders are driven to some extent by Achievement and Power.
Through the online test, What Motivates You At Work?, we’ve discovered that there are five major drives that motivate people at work; Achievement, Power, Affiliation, Security and Adventure.
Based on more than 100,000 respondents, we know that about 14% of people have a Power drive, but senior executives are about 75% more likely to be Power-driven than are frontline employees. Leaders with a strong Power drive like to be in charge, to direct others and to take on the role of ‘decider.’ Someone with a high Achievement drive (about 30% of people) is highly motivated when they’re able to completely immerse themselves in a project, to deliver perfect work, and when their work is challenging.
While those Achievement and Power driven people are necessary to ignite rapid growth, they will need to learn how to delegate and lead through others if the company is going to scale significantly.
Len Finkle is the CEO of Profisee, one of the fastest-growing master data management companies in the market. Finkle was brought on as CEO because of his history scaling multiple start-ups whose investors wanted growth beyond the original founder’s vision. From those experiences, Finkle shared that one of his biggest scaling lessons is, “You have to be willing to not do everything yourself. You have to be willing to delegate and truly lead through others. You can get away with doing every little task yourself when you’re in startup mode, but that will become a significant impediment to your growth.”
This is a mindset shift required in many startup companies seeking to scale. Finkle notes, “A CEO with a scaling mindset will need to get their people thinking differently. It’s awfully easy for managers to slip into the mindset of only worrying about themselves and their own particular set of tasks. But as an organization grows, it’s critical to inculcate a more delegative and collaborative mindset. Otherwise, you won’t get the power of multiples that comes with larger organizations.”
The next question, of course, becomes how to inculcate and shift leaders’ mindsets. One way that Finkle accomplishes this is by modeling vulnerability and a willingness to change. For example, he shared with me that, “I was setting too many priorities, and we needed to be a bit more focused. So I asked my executive team to actually hold me accountable. At our next quarterly strategy meeting, we began by discussing to what extent they felt I was living up to what I had said I would do. If I’m okay being vulnerable and admitting that I wasn’t perfect, it makes it far easier for everyone else to do the same. It’s okay to struggle with delegating and collaborating, as long as we can admit it to each other and start fixing it.”
In Leadership IQ’s new study, How Effective Is Your Executive Team?, we discovered that only 41% of executives believe that members of the senior team hold each other accountable. If you don’t have a brave soul willing to step forward and ask for help changing their mindset, you could (like Profisee’s team) regularly assess the executive team. Ask every member of the team to complete a survey and be sure to include a question like, “On our Executive Team, we hold each other accountable.”
If you can get your executive team to start asking for help and holding each other accountable, it’ll be far easier to instill a delegative and collaborative mindset through the rest of the company’s leaders. And when you’ve got that, you have a foundation for significant scaling.
