This time of year, many of us are reflecting on the past twelve months and setting course for the next. I spent a lot of time last year thinking about the future. At my company, we launched a growth initiative designed to help us scale our business. We tapped into experienced resources to help us get smarter about the process and rolled up our sleeves to get started.
I was a little surprised that one of the first steps involved revisiting the core values of our organization. While I recognized the obvious importance of our values, I had more pressing and practical issues in mind. Are we headed in the right direction? What infrastructure should we be investing in? What kind of resources do we need to fuel our growth? How much is this going to cost?
What I quickly came to realize was just how much this initial work around values would help inform the more practical questions, bringing new focus and influencing factors impacting our ability to grow. Here are three examples:
Letting Go
Working on scaling values has a huge impact on one of the toughest struggles for many entrepreneurs: letting go. As the leader of a growing organization, you increasingly feel like you’re being pulled in a thousand new and necessary directions. Obviously, you can’t be everywhere always.
We’ve all heard (and used) the many rationales for why we as business owners are the only people who can handle certain day-to-day aspects of the work. “Our business is unique.” “We have demanding clients.” “Solutions are complex and require extensive knowledge of codes and regulations.” Sound familiar?
But you’ve done the disciplined work of hiring a team of talented, bright and motivated people. And you’ve given them the right tools and training to excel. What’s really at play here?
For me, taking a closer look at the underlying values has created paths to new ways of working. Start with a few questions: What are the things that guide my decisions in these situations? Have I articulated them, or are they simply in my head? Once articulated, are they presented in a way that is relevant to everyone in my organization?
Once that work has been done, I know that our well-assembled team will focus on the key factors that make us most valuable to our clients. My actions as a leader also better reflect the trust I have for the capable people we have in place.
Automating Workflow
One of the most exciting aspects of growing is having more opportunities to leverage technology to improve the speed and quality of your work. There is no shortage of solutions out there -- from off the shelf to custom -- and it can be overwhelming to determine the right fit.
This is where a focus on values can help. For example, our promise to clients is that we manage their projects from “concept to construction.” That includes handling any bump in the road as well as anticipating and avoiding obstacles that might impact success.
Maintaining and growing client business is fought and won in how you are delivering that most important final 5% of the work. Anyone who knows project management knows that that last 5% can be the most time and resource consuming. Is there new technology that will help automate the end of project cycles?
But there is another aspect of how we view that last 5%. The last stretch of any project is a time that is rich with opportunities to make sure outcomes meet and exceed expectations. Over-automating can rob you of the opportunity for the face-to-face active listening needed to gauge current and potential impact. By considering all dimensions of your core values, you start to see a narrower list of solutions that will fit.
We challenge our team with a set of metrics that incorporate our core value statements, specifically an articulation of how we measure success against how we view that last 5%.
Measuring Success
“How is your company doing?” It’s a question that shouldn’t stump me. But as a younger entrepreneur navigating growth, the milestones along the way are new. Quite frankly, some days it’s hard to tell the difference between thriving and just surviving.
By the traditional measures of success, we’re doing very well. Billings and headcounts are up. We have a healthy mix of projects in the pipeline. We have a great new office space. But to characterize the health of our operation based on these metrics seems incomplete.
The work we’ve done to articulate our values as part of our growth initiative has been valuable in terms of making sure that we are scaling in the right direction and at the right pace. It’s also reminded me of what exactly has gotten us to where we are. We set out with a clear mission to change the face of engineering fueled by a set of shared values. Our success has largely been due to the market responding to our new approach.
The complete answer of how our business is doing includes a measure of how we are living those values. They guide us through the ups and the downs. They help us maintain our unique point of view and our competitive edge during a scaling process where the outcome of chasing best practices can result in becoming like everyone else.
Consider creating a metric to track how performance against the company’s core values is linked to profitability. You’ll always have a clear and complete answer for “How are you doing?” as well as a helpful guide for making key business decisions to grow beyond the numbers.
Taking your company to the next level is both exciting and daunting. Decisions have larger and longer-term impacts. But keeping your organization’s values front and center will help guide your decision making, and making sure your team has internalized those values will help you collectively grow in a way that stays true to who you are and what made you successful in the first place.
