Assessing intentions and systems as your company grows

#Check-in on intentions and systems as your company grows

As fate would have it, my friend James and I ended up in the same tiny niche. Our companies compete for the same clients. Mine is 5 years old and his is under 2. Since we both enjoy yammering about business, interesting discussions of the inner-workings ensued (while not giving secrets to the enemy, of course).

Ironically, we each yearned for what the other had. I thought my work could use less systems and some flattening. While he was done with flat. They have 5x less people and he sees it all. He wants to be lowered down from such height. I can relate to this during the do-it-all, freelancer days. Sales, marketing, designing, building, retention. It’s a lot.

These organizational systems occurred naturally during the growth each company.

Ours is a process of organized to-dos. The high level is a ‘sequence’, which can be triggered, then managers assign ‘to-dos’ out of that sequence to appropriate people, finally, the to-dos are done like checklists, such as, “style the 404 page”.

This was all very sophisticated when I started, especially after being a freelancer with no experience on an in-house team. The setting up of new hosting, the content writing schedules and the big launch were all within the framework. I wasn’t around for their creation, but you can picture how they were born: a mistake was made, an item was added to a list to avoid it next time. And so on. They help maintain a high quality of work. As a freelancer, it’s difficult to get out of the reactive state to have time to build machines like that.

James isn’t there yet. His company get things done by relying on people. The trust is in peers not processes. But people can forget, or get sick or quit.

###So, systems can be good.

But, there’s a benefit to seeing the whole.

Allowing employees to understand how the business works as a whole gives more opportunity to bring up ideas and offer different perspectives. This is the growing ‘flat organization’ trend.

Automation can save loads of human brain power, but built too high and employees can’t see out. Your collective brain power potential goes back down as it becomes individualized.

###So, systems can be bad.

##As you probably guessed, the sweet-spot is between the extremes.

The flatter, the more nimble you are to change directions and scrap processes. That, in turn, puts more trust and work and responsibility on employees. The fatter, we’ll say, the slower you are to change hard earned processes, but those processes save time and lesson mistakes.

Reed Hastings, the Netflix CEO, had a good note about that;

The more talent density u have the less process you need. The more process u create the less talent you retain.

He’s championing the flatter approach. Putting more faith in his co-workers.

Structures like this will emerge. A little intention can guide them.