Congratulations! You've launched your business, hired the right people and operations are humming along smoothly. But before you get too comfortable with success, realize it won’t be too long before you need to gear up for the next step of you company: Growth.
In order to effectively compete in the market, leaders must celebrate successes but also keep an eye on progress. To achieve this, they need to create an organizational culture that encourages and supports continuous growth on the corporate, cultural and individual level.
Here are three things leaders can do to construct a corporate environment built for advancement.
Appoint informal leaders. As you communicate your vision, mission and strategy, you’ll want the rest of the company to be on board, too. Just because employees submit to directives, doesn’t mean they embrace it. For successful implementation and companywide buy-in, you’ll need to appoint informal leaders throughout your company.
These informal leaders can translate initiatives in a way that’s relevant to the rest of the staff and serve as crucial sounding boards for your ideas. Their on-the-ground perspective can provide key insights that may not have jumped out at first blush, and their keen eye may help refine and finalize your corporate strategy and communication plan.
Let people own their work. On top of informal leaders, you’ll also need formally appointed people who will be in charge of these new projects and processes. By sharing responsibility, people can infuse their own unique ideas and creativity, take ownership of their work and see how their efforts contribute to the overarching vision.
For this to be successful, make sure each project has an appointed leader, with clearly defined roles and tasks. Each team member should know what they’re responsible for and how metrics for success will be measured. They should also know how their work furthers the company vision, and, perhaps most importantly, see how these new responsibilities directly help them achieve their personal career goals.
Establish effective processes. Just like with individual growth, it’s crucial to document corporate transformation with clearly defined goals and metrics for success. This may come as a surprise, but documentation doesn’t need to be a complex process. For example, our Comcast Business Cloud Solutions allow businesses to collaborate through a wide variety of powerful software tools, such as a file sharing and web conferencing. Regularly updated spreadsheets can also suffice. The goal is to ensure every task and expenditure of energy and time helps achieve the company vision.
Documents can also be supported by checklists that ask simple but key questions like, “Have we met as a group? Are we regularly brainstorming? When’s the last time we checked our work?” By creating a checklist, managers are anticipating unforeseen changes, keeping track with simple project management tools and providing documentation for overcoming future obstacles and challenges.
Our Comcast Business customers in Colorado know change is an inevitable part of growth, but building an environment fit for continuous change doesn’t have to be complicated. By appointing informal leaders as sounding boards, letting staff take ownership of their work and establishing effective processes, change can be a positive and predictable part of your company culture.
Stay in the know with more resources from Comcast Business.
Shawn Adamson is the vice president of Comcast Business for the Mountain West Region
