Growth Is a Brilliant Storyteller

Strategy & Growth

8 Oct

I love working with growing businesses. There is energy, ambition and a genuine sense of possibility. At first, the story of growth is usually an exciting one: more customers, more opportunities, more people and more momentum.

But growth is also a brilliant storyteller because it reveals what is happening inside the business as it gets bigger. It shows what has kept pace, what is beginning to strain and what the business may have quietly outgrown.

Choosing to grow is a strategic decision. It involves choices about where growth will come from, which customers or markets the business will serve, and whether products or services need to change. But there is another question that can be easier to overlook:

What will need to change inside the business to support that growth?

Because getting bigger does not necessarily mean the business is getting stronger. More customers can increase revenue but also put pressure on service. More people can increase capacity while creating more hand-offs and complexity. More locations can create opportunity while making communication and coordination harder.

When the Story Starts to Change

One of the first things I notice when a business has outgrown the way it used to operate is friction. Processes that once worked quickly and effectively begin to slow down. They may no longer produce the same result with the same speed or certainty.

People feel the pressure and start compensating. Steps get skipped. Workarounds emerge. Someone finds a faster way of doing something without necessarily considering how that change affects another person, team or part of the process. At first, these adaptations can look resourceful because people are trying to get the job done.

But as complexity increases, gaps begin to appear. Information gets missed, deadlines slip, work falls between roles and customers begin to feel the impact. Eventually, the story can shift again: frustration turns into conflict, and the conversation moves from solving the problem to finding someone to blame.

When an Operating Problem Looks Like a People Problem

Leaders understandably focus on what they can see. They see missed deadlines, errors, rework and people who appear unable to keep up. The language can quickly become, “Why can’t they just get on with it?”, “Why are we still making these mistakes?” or even, “They are just not capable enough to do the job.”

But before deciding that the people are the problem, there is another question worth asking:

Have the people suddenly become less capable, or has the business changed around them?

The business may now have more customers, more transactions, more people, more decisions, more dependencies and more hand-offs between teams. Yet the underlying processes, systems and decision-making arrangements may still have been designed for a much smaller organisation. People then become the visible point at which that mismatch shows up.

More Effort Is Not the Same as More Capability

When results start slipping, the natural response is often to increase activity. Leaders may:

recruit another person;
ask everyone to move faster;
expect people to start earlier or stay later;
add another meeting; or
push harder for output.

But if people are already working longer hours simply to achieve results the business once achieved more easily, that is useful information. It does not automatically mean that a process or system is the problem, but it is a signal worth investigating before assuming that more people, more hours or more activity will solve it.

There comes a point where effort cannot compensate for ways of working that no longer suit the size and complexity of the business.

The Business Has to Grow on the Inside

Growing well means deliberately strengthening the business as it grows. The areas that need attention are interconnected, but some useful questions include:

Strategy - Are we clear about the kind of growth we actually want and what that growth will require from the business?
Priorities and deliverables – Have we translated that direction into a small number of clear priorities, outcomes and accountabilities, or is everything competing for attention?
Processes and systems - Do they still suit the volume, complexity and speed of the business, or are people constantly working around them?
Decision-making - Are decisions sitting with too few people, taking too long or are people unclear about who has authority to make them?
Leadership - Are leaders able to operate at the level the business now requires, or are they continually being pulled back into day-to-day problems?
Teams and ownership - Are responsibilities clear, and can people work effectively across roles and functions, share information, coordinate their work and take ownership without everything escalating upwards?

None of these areas operates in isolation. A new process will not solve much if decision-making remains unclear. Asking managers to take more ownership will not work if every meaningful decision still needs approval from above. Adding more people may simply add another layer of complexity if roles and responsibilities are already blurred.

Growth changes the demands placed on the whole business. The business has to grow on the inside as well as the outside.

Getting Bigger Is Not the Same as Growing Well

So the measure of growth should not simply be, “How much bigger have we become?” A more useful question is:

Has the business become stronger as a result?

Can it make decisions more effectively?
Can leaders operate at the level the business now needs?
Can teams coordinate their work without relying on informal workarounds?
Can the business continue delivering for customers without depending on people continually working harder just to keep up?

Growth will always create some pressure. The important question is what that pressure is telling you. If work that once felt straightforward is becoming harder, decisions are slowing down, people are increasingly relying on workarounds and effort keeps rising simply to maintain results, the answer may not be to push harder.

The business may be telling you that it has outgrown the way it operates.

As the business grows, the way the business operates has to grow with it.