Redefine Roles as Your Company Grows

This article is part of a series on right-sizing your company.

In a previous article we discussed the reasons why less than 3% of companies successfully grow to the next tier.   Today we’ll discuss one of the actions you can take to allow your company to avoid the growth pains that most companies experience.  Specifically, this is how to evolve employee’s roles at different stages of growth.  

When companies outgrow their old ways of operating, employees are the first to feel the pain.  Day-to-day operations can begin to feel more like chaos than synergy.  Employee stress rises, job satisfaction declines, and critical things start to fall through the cracks. 

These issues are clearly avoidable.  One of the key ways to accomplish this is by changing employees’ roles as the company grows.  Smaller companies typically need employees that are generalists who can wear many hats.  Their roles are more loosely defined so they can shift their attention to the areas of greatest need.  As companies grow, the need for more clearly defined job roles increases.  Initially this involves creating clear role definitions that provide accountability for specific areas of the business.  As companies become even larger, the need for having true specialists becomes important as roles begin to focus on more narrow activities.    

While the method to define these roles is a more detailed conversation, once the roles are in-place the key is to align the roles with the right people and then equip those people to succeed.  Once the processes are clearly defined, the next step is to sequence the transition of the activities so that employees do not become overwhelmed.  As each new activity is transitioned, explain the context and objective of the activity, and then provide hands-on training.  This ideally includes shadowing someone else who is already an expert. Frequent check-ins are also crucial to ensure understanding and quality performance.  Finally, the more involved employees are in the process, the more they will own the outcomes and be engaged.

If you’d like to learn more about how to right-size your organization as your company grows, feel free to contact us at Anavo.  We’d be happy to share methods and processes that can help your company succeed as it grows.  In upcoming articles we will continue exploring more strategies you can pursue to prepare for growth.  You can also find additional articles on our blog page or reach out to us at Anavo Growth Partners to learn more.