Strategies for Growth and Development

What makes your company unique, successful and attractive to clients? What would motivate your customers to favor a competitor?

Whether your organization is a young entrepreneurial start-up or a more mature organization entering a new market, there are shared features. Amar Bhide, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School and former McKinsey consultant notes that “competitors can easily knock off an entrepreneur’s innovative product but they will find it much more difficult to replicate systems that incorporate many distinct and complimentary capabilities. A business with an attractive product line, well integrated manufacturing and logistics, close relationships with distributors, a culture of responsiveness to customers and the capability to produce a continuing stream of product innovations is not easy to copy.”

So how may the investment in your company be rewarded and how can you continue to build trust and confidence in your leadership ability? Executing your chosen strategy depends on an organization’s “hard” infrastructure -- its organizational structure and systems, and its “soft” infrastructure which includes the culture and the values.

Keep in mind that this analytical approach can be applied to an entrepreneurial organization or a more mature organization in pursuit of growth through new divisions, product lines, or markets. The same principles still apply.

Successful results depend on the organizations’ capacity to execute delegating tasks and specializing tasks. For delegating, consider that in a small start-up, everyone does a little bit of everything but as a business grows and tries to achieve economies of scale and scope, employees must be assigned to clearly defined roles and grouped into the appropriate organizational units. An organizational role encompasses the tasks required, procedures to be used, performance measurements and personal qualifications to enable that performance.

At Greco Apparel, we use a series of tests for new associates to broaden management’s understanding of an individual’s capabilities and personality characteristics. The test results, shared with the new associate, form the basis of training that may be required and recognize areas of strengths and weaknesses.

Our management system utilizes a developmental management model under which a manager works with his or her direct reports (workers) to develop capabilities on a per task basis. Each task is examined separately to determine the level of input required by the manager to enable the worker to be successful. When a task is new, for example, closer direction of the manager is typically required. As the worker develops competency and shows the ability to accept the responsibility, the manager is less involved until the point where the worked has demonstrated performance and the task can be fully and confidently delegated. Remember the function of the manager is to assure successful performance by the worker so support should be given as required.

The manager conducts regular meetings with the group of direct reports to foster a smooth working relationship among that group. When the group is functioning at a high level, minimal involvement of the manager will be required. People learn to resolve problems through collaboration and interdependency among peers. Quick resolutions lead to lower costs and better service to clients.

As the organization grows and people are hired or promoted the roles will remain the same based on a functional organization chart. Management must determine whether the new person filling that role has the competency required or which improvements may be required in education training or coaching. The goal is to reach the stage where all tasks are able to be fully delegated. As this plateau is achieved, there is less direction and involvement required of the manager to assure expected and successful performance of the worker.

The culture of the organization determines the personalities and temperaments of the workforce and the degree to which the individual employees and organizational units compete and cooperate. More than any other factor, culture determines whether an organization can cope with the crises and discontinuities of growth. Under stressful circumstances one will readily identify where there may be weaknesses in the system or in an individual’s capability to perform. An entrepreneur should evolve from doing the work to teaching others how to do it, prescribing desired results and eventually to managing the overall context in which the work is done.

When the entrepreneur has moved to this next level of teaching others how to operate the systems that have been established, then the organization has moved to the professionally managed stage. The entrepreneur has the challenge of deciding what to do at this point. Can the transition be made from business founder to professional executive? This is possible but few make the change successfully or willingly. A great example is Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx. Fred conceived the company as a term paper while at Yale and got only a “C” on the paper because his professor thought an overnight delivery service was a dumb idea. To his credit, Fred was correct and wildly successful. He continued to acquire the skills necessary to remain as CEO and lead the company to amazing, multi-billion dollar growth.

At our company, my current goal is to become more value-added. As our capable associates have learned to manage the marketing and sales functions and others fill manufacturing roles and become proficient at on-time delivery of quality garments, I can concentrate on activities that don’t necessitate my direct involvement in daily operations. I can focus on projects that will affect our future in the near and longer term. For example, we are expanding our sourcing to include global capability while increasing our product line to offer garments we had not manufactured previously but that are now required by our clients. If I did not have capable managers filling key roles and teaching others, the expansion that will contribute to future growth and profitability for all our benefit would not be possible.

Joseph Greco is president of Greco Apparel. Visit them on the web at www.grecoapparel.com