30 learnings from 3 hours with 6 scale-up rockstars
With Grow With The Flow, we host regular brunches for scale-up about the topic of organization and leadership.
Our latest session, at Showpad’s office, included the crème de la crème of the Belgian scale-up landscape:
Joris De Bruyne kicked off with an inspiring presentation about EyeSee’s impressive growth journey, offering an inside look at scaling and leading the internal organization to 150 colleagues.🔥
The density of insights shared during the subsequent group conversation was impressive.
Here are 30 learnings:
A common enemy is the easiest and quickest way to unite and motivate the team…
… but it may not be a sustainable method because what happens after the enemy is defeated?
Ultimately, one needs to identify a deeper, shared purpose that connects the team, which is a more sustainable way to mobilize them.
Pain can be used to motivated people to embrace change…
… but should be rooted in actual frustrations that people experience.
Culture needs to be made explicit, with the key messages reduced to what’s essential.
During times of change, reassuring people that the core culture will remain intact can provide stability.
Never sugarcoat communication during change, people see through it. Be transparent.
Encouraging autonomy in country cultures with high power distance is challenging as people may expect “strong leaders” who tell them what to do.
Communication during change needs to be tailored to team members’ varying tenures at the company. Long-term employees often better understand the context and bigger picture.
To maintain team trust, “sunshine failures” (as Netflix calls it): communicate transparently instead of hiding mistakes.
Transparency should be proportional to education about context. Without it, information risks being misinterpreted.
Let some fires burn. Focus on addressing the most critical underlying systems instead of trying to put out every small fire.
Allow the change process to run its course, each phase needs time. Keep communicating throughout.
Give data teams a communication roadmap for informing the rest of the team.
Offer yearly values training for all employees and leadership training for managers…
…with content tailored to tenure to avoid repetition.
Having your Chief of Staff manage the data & operations departments can help them build relationships across the company while developing management skills, making it an ideal stepping stone toward the COO role.
Leaders should constantly share context and repeat it until they are tired of hearing themselves. Others need repetition to fully absorb it.
Let go of constantly solving all communication gaps. Constant perfection is not possible; consider communication a journey.
Hire for culture fit (complementary & diversity), not social fit (likability). You don’t want too homogeneous teams; diversity is needed for higher team effectiveness.
Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) can sometimes be improved 4x through better internal communication by leaders.
In conflict-avoidant cultures, delegated feedback (delivered by someone else) may be a method to ensure critical points get addressed.
Decentralized innovation efforts can be aligned with strategy by presenting differently quarterly themes for innovation.
Educate the team on the importance of constant renewal, like a lobster replacing its shell to grow and evolve.
Clear boundaries are liberating, not limiting. They increase, rather than decrease, initiative-taking. Without explicit boundaries, team members may hesitate to act for fear of breaking unwritten rules.
Keep your alumni close. They may return as “boomerangs” or serve as ambassadors in other ways.
An innovation team that is entirely separate from operations and explicitly told they can “break all the rules” can be highly effective.
Townhalls become more engaging when teams are empowered to host them on a rotational basis.
Innovation teams thrive when they are diverse and intrinsically motivated, so select members thoughtfully.
In short: Not a single scale-up has completed “the perfect growth journey”. There is no such thing. The road is bumpy and messy for even the most successful scale-ups, and that’s how it has to be.
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