Every healthy organization desires growth. But few organizations experience the kind of growth they desire. Think about your organization. Have you taken steps to experience significant growth? As believers, we understand the importance of 'preparing the soil' for God to bless. Along with prayer and wise counsel, leaders must take practical steps toward growth. Here are three steps your organization can take to prepare for unprecedented growth.
1. Infrastructure Investment
Reflect for a moment: Could your organization's current systems support 10x growth? What would happen if God brought your organization 10 times more people, 10 times more customers, or 10 times more financial resources? It is easy to dream big, but real preparation can be difficult. If you want to fulfill God's vision for your life and make an eternal impact, you must stand ready.
With honest reflection, leaders often find gaps in one of two areas - production or people.
Production gaps are what many leaders think of when they reflect on what is holding them back from significant growth. Production gaps are those capacity ceilings presented by your physical assets. Many leaders feel trapped by the significant capital needed to expand production capacity.
Imagine your building only holds 20 people. It will be difficult to host 200 but even more difficult to build a bigger building. Likewise, suppose you are in manufacturing. If your equipment can only deliver 1,000 units a day, it will be impossible to produce 10,000. Again, buying extra equipment is costly.
Your organization’s production ceiling must be overcome on the path to 10x growth.
To overcome this, consider the path to 10x growth. Before you have 200 people, you would have 100. Before 10,000 units, you would have 5,000. Listing your organization's various production ceilings. On the path to 10x, when would you encounter these ceilings? From this, develop a strategic plan for bridging these gaps and overcoming obstacles. In developing a strategic plan, many leaders discover the next barrier to growth: people.
Begin reflecting on the people gaps you need to fill to manage and lead this growth.
People gaps take the form of key talent, knowledge, or experiences your team lacks. With your team, identify what talent, knowledge, or experiences you need to sustain 10x growth. Closing these gaps begins with identifying knowledge and skill gaps within the team. Once the necessary gaps are clear, begin seeing who God prepares from within the team. Do not hesitate to shuffle the team. Sometimes, aligning the same people into new roles better suited to their giftings and talents can bring substantial growth. At the same time, do not be afraid to see who God may bring to the team.
2. Delegate Decision-Making
As organizations scale in size, decision-making must scale with it. As a leader, you know the pressure of leadership. While you may want to 10x your organization, no leader wants to 10x their stress. Too few leaders prepare for this inevitability of growth. To achieve 10x growth, effective leaders change how decision-making occurs within the team.
Decentralized decision-making is a key step in ensuring scalable, and effective organizational growth.
Normal resource limitations such as money, time, or people squelch exponential growth. By decentralizing decision-making, leaders delegate authority to team members. This change accelerates the speed at which projects can operate.
Decentralized decision-making is the practice of delegated authority. This places decisions in the hands of team members based on clear communication. This authority then allows team members to make decisions that impact their role.
By placing the decision-making in the hands of those closest to the challenge, decisions occur faster and often with more informed insight.
For success, leaders must protect from overlapping objectives or misaligned initiatives. The best leaders will begin to focus on systems development.
Leaders must develop systems to scale the decision-making process. These systems must communicate three key components:
Vision
Role
Deliverables
First, the vision must be clear. An unclear vision will result in decisions separate from the organization’s vision. Clear vision ensures decisions align with the direction of the organization. Second, a team member's role must be clear. A clear role allows them to understand the scope of their decision-making authority. Finally, the deliverables must be clear. Clear deliverables allow individuals to see their connection to the team and where they fit into the larger picture.
3. Clarify the Calling
Growth requires clarity. Clarify the higher calling of the organization.
If your team is going to experience significant growth, you must clarify the vision, audience, and solutions you offer.
To see 10x growth, you must know and believe your vision. The vision is the mental image of the preferred future that you communicate to the team. The vision is the driving force behind your organization’s “why?”. For church leaders, it may be to see their community transformed by the power and truth of the Gospel. For Christian business leaders, it may be to see Gospel impact through local economic initiatives.
No matter the vision, leaders must ensure the team remains unified around the vision.
To see 10x growth, you must know your audience. The audience is the group of people your organization influences. Often times this can be a geographic region: your community, city, or nation. Other times an audience connects through a knowledge category or shared interest.
Your organization must understand the needs faced by those within your audience. For church leaders, this includes the need for salvation and discipleship and could include needs like lessons on biblical marriage, or raising children. For business leaders, your audience is different from what you sell. Instead, your audience is who your organization is seeking to serve. Knowing your audience means knowing their needs.
When you know the audience's needs, you can align the organization to meet those needs and develop relevant solutions.
To see 10x growth, you must identify solutions. With a clear vision and audience, you and your team can identify relevant solutions to meet those needs. Meeting the needs of your audience requires an ability to adapt and diversify.
As a leader, you must not be afraid to diversify how you meet the needs of your audience.
It is from this intentional diversification that a greater impact can occur. Leaders rightly fear distraction or mission drift, but too few know how to identify it. To overcome this, consider the new solution in light of the vision. If the new idea does not support the vision, it is a distraction, not a new solution for your audience.
Every organization desires growth, but few achieve it.
God is calling His people to lead differently. Invest in your people. Identify the physical resources needed to sustain the blessing and growth God wants to bring. Equip your team well and delegate decision-making so your organization can grow. As you clarify your calling, communicate passionately to your team so that God’s heart to meet the needs of others becomes central to your innovation and growth.
Data and information are essential for knowing how effective your organization or ministry is, but knowing the right data to measure is the most important key to your success.