What May Be the Secret Sauce Behind Fast-Growing Organizations

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What May Be the Secret Sauce Behind Fast-Growing Organizations

By Marcel Schwantes | Inc Magazine | July 1, 2024

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CEOs have plenty of obvious benchmarks for assessing how the company is doing: winning a huge customer, hitting sales forecasts, securing funding, and increasing market share are just a few. The metrics for assessing how that same organization functions day-to-day are practically clandestine in comparison.  According to Rob Bier’s book Smooth Scaling: 20 Rituals to Build a Friction-Free Organization, if you’re losing a little bit of momentum each day (through bad meetings, poorly defined goals, or other things that cause organizational friction) over time, you will have lost a lot of ground without understanding how it happened.  Bier, a celebrated leadership coach and advisor to fast-moving global companies, shared with the author how organizations can scale quickly without losing their way.

1. Business results don’t measure today’s health.  Because most leaders don’t know how to assess the day-to-day performance of their organizations, they focus on the easiest-to-see business results.  Going about it this way has two problems. First, these results are a lagging indicator. The work your teams are doing now may not translate into measurable success or failure in the marketplace for many months or even years. You can’t afford to wait that long to know whether your people and processes are operating at peak effectiveness or not.  Second, business results are not totally in your control. Many factors, including those well beyond your ability to influence, will ultimately determine your company’s performance: macroeconomic conditions, financial markets, changes in industry trends or regulations, and what your competitors do.
2. High performance requires integrating Productivity and Positivity.  Most companies want to have a thriving people-centric culture as well as a productive one.  For Bier, that is what he calls “positivity.”  It boils down to ensuring your employees are happy.  The problem, Bier says, is that many organizations are confused about what making employees happy really means. So they focus on making them happy to come to work – by giving them fancy offices, free snacks, or expensive training programs. Because these solutions cost money, many organizations invest in these things when times are good but cut back as soon as times are bad.  This inconsistent approach breeds cynicism, Bier says, but in reality, it makes sense since senior executives are rightly questioning deep down whether these investments actually produce better results.
3. Instead of making people happy to come to work, make them happy doing the work.  Perks like free lunch and nice décor are beside the point, according to Bier. Instead of making people happy to come to work, make them happy doing the work.  Bier points out that the main driver of how much people enjoy doing their work is the quality of their interactions – if you love working with your team, you have an open, high-trust relationship with your manager, and your cross-functional team has healthy and constructive debates, then doing the work is the fun part.
4. Work experience is driven by the quality of human interactions.  Sustainable work performance is the sweet spot where Productivity and Positivity are both high–where your team achieves great things and feels good about how they achieved them. Nothing determines how people feel about their work more than the quality of the interactions they have with their colleagues.  “Leaders should focus on the quality of the conversation happening. This gets harder as the numbers grow, but the culture depends on it,” Bier says.  By investing in teaching people how to hold conversations of all types that are consistently productive and positive, leaders can build a high-performing culture that propels itself, where increased positivity drives productivity and increased productivity drives positivity.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. CEOs have plenty of obvious benchmarks for assessing how the company is doing: winning a huge customer, hitting sales forecasts, securing funding, and increasing market share are just a few. The metrics for assessing how that same organization functions day-to-day are practically clandestine in comparison.  
2. According to Rob Bier’s book Smooth Scaling: 20 Rituals to Build a Friction-Free Organization, if you’re losing a little bit of momentum each day (through bad meetings, poorly defined goals, or other things that cause organizational friction) over time, you will have lost a lot of ground without understanding how it happened.  
3. According to Bier how organizations can scale quickly without losing their way, they should adhere to his following advises: Business results don’t measure today’s health, High performance requires integrating Productivity and Positivity, Instead of making people happy to come to work, make them happy doing the work, and Work experience is driven by the quality of human interactions. 

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Topics:  Growth, Productivity, Positivity, Leadership