How To Build An Enduring Company, Two Critical Things To Consider When Restructuring & How To Work With (Almost) Anyone
15 October 2023 Newsletter
“Urgency gets more people to buy. Scarcity gets people to pay more.”
Hope you’re Thriving!
It’s been a good week back with a workshop and several meetings.
Here’s a growth fact I wrote in this newsletter ten years ago:
A $10m company growing at 25% will be 3.8 times the size in 6 years and have revenues of $145m in 12 years or 14.5 times the size. The beauty of compound growth!
Let’s get into it.
How To Work With (Almost) Anyone
At a [ quarterly planning workshop this week, we discussed team dynamics and building healthy, trusting relationships between team members.
Some team members had been through ups and downs in their relationship, and it was an open point of discussion.
We were working together on the Five Dysfunctions of a Team pyramid, and the pyramid’s base is trust. The temptation of a leader is to be invulnerable. To be strong and smart and not show any ‘chinks’ in the armour.
Instead of succumbing to that temptation, leaders should demonstrate vulnerability by owning their mistakes.
But simply asking team members to be more vulnerable wouldn’t be enough to build trust. So I suggested a book I recently read called How To Work With (Almost) Anyone by Michael Bungay Stanier.
Here’s the synopsis:
Your happiness and your success depend on your working relationships.
The people you manage. How well you work with your boss. The way collaboration happens with colleagues and peers. How you connect with important prospects and key clients.
But the hard truth is this: most of us leave the health and fate of these relationships to chance.
We say “Hi,” exchange pleasantries … and hope for the best.
But every relationship becomes suboptimal at some point, whether it’s a good one that goes off the rails or one that was poor from the start.
Mostly we are resigned to the fact that this is what happens: relationships always get a little broken, or a little stale, or a little worse. C’est la vie, c’est la guerre. Carry on.
But it doesn’t have to be like this.
Every working relationship can be better.
This book shows you how to build the best possible relationship.
What I loved about the book was that it provides a roadmap to build or reset a relationship beginning with a ‘Keystone conversation’ and taking readers through the journey to achieve the best possible relationship.
Two Critical Things To Consider When Restructuring Your Company
“I’m thinking of restructuring my company”.
That’s one of the statements I often hear.
Restructuring the company typically involves significant changes in roles, responsibilities, and reporting lines, to name a few. This can be met with resistance from employees who are comfortable with the existing structure and processes.
There are different organisational structure examples, some of them focused on Functions, others designed around Products, or Divisions, and even more complex Matrix-based designs.
However, those organisational structures have one thing in common: they are designed to optimise a specific objective driven by the company customers’ expectations and value chain.
You’re probably thinking, “So, which one is the right organisational structure design for me?”.
To help you design the organisational structure optimised to meet your needs, consider the following questions:
- How can a better company structure make it easier for delegation?
- How can we accelerate decision-making to service our customers better?
- How everyone in the company can contribute to the company value chain?
- How our new structure can help drive priorities every quarter?
Continue reading the article here.
How To Build An Enduring Company- Podcast Episode
A podcast I appeared on was released this week with Carl Cox — and it was one of my favourites.
Carl Cox is the CEO and founder of 40 Strategy, author of Lost at CEO, and Host of the Measure Success podcast.
Carl has been an executive leader in seven different organisations that have grown from 2x to 7x, with operations in four continents.
Today, Carl is tracking towards his 10-year vision to positively impact over 1 million people, 10,000 organisations, and to donate at least $1 million to charity.
But more than that, he is just a super smart, good guy — and we enjoyed a great chat.
From the podcast synopsis — Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- What Brad’s company does, plus the biggest surprises that his clients experience after beginning to work with him
- Why Brad thinks “goals are garbage” — and how to strategise your future more effectively
- The money and liquidity principles that Brad encourages companies to follow and how those help them weather external storms
- Why a strong leadership team and a democratisation of the decision-making process can help establish better financial planning habits within a business
- The hole in the book market that Brad saw and how his latest book plugged that gap
- How to define a CEO’s actual role — and then how to measure success within that role
- How Brad helps CEOs and leaders define better KPIs in order to measure success within their organisations
- Why flexibility is so important when it comes to determining your organisation’s KPIs (and the balance to strike between lagging and leading indicators)
- The one metric Brad uses to measure success within his business
- The importance of gut feel for Brad when it comes to measuring how successful he is in his personal life
Listen to the podcast here:
Apple podcast
YouTube
Spotify
Website: Podcast — 40Strategy
Originally published at https://evolutionpartners.com.au on October 15, 2023.
