When Small Becomes Big

Organizations aren’t born big- neither do they come with an expected accoutrement of defined policies and systems. They are born from an idea to incubate the fledgling into an independent and capable entity. And the journey doesn’t stop here. It then becomes a pursuit of growing from small to big and then big to bigger.

But how does a firm do it? What takes it to reach a milestone and then head for another? Is it the people or is it the way it functions, independent of people? My reasoning is that organizations equip themselves with human talent and skills, within the framework of processes to reach common goals, and that people are a bigger factor than anything else. But does it always stay the same way?

But how do humans adapt to the firm’s need for growth, and how do they bring their own pace in equilibrium with that of the organization’s?

A clutch of employees make up a firm in its initial days, all part of tacitly creating and maintaining a work culture that all conform to and contribute to. And it’s easier to do that when there are just a handful of them. In a compact organization, employees exercise their social as well as hierarchical influence to determine culture, work ethics and ethos. The sum total of this influence is greater than the whole that the organization itself would exert.

However, when an organization starts to spread its wings, the culture undergoes a change as well. It braces for impact from new ideologies and ways of functioning from the plethora of new employees or new processes inducted. Existing employees realize that they need to go with that understated current of metamorphosis but the transition always comes with a cost.

The organizational framework that worked just fine when the firm was smaller now seems to creak with the additional weight of people, pace and expectations. Decisions that earlier took a day and a single meeting to make now take a committee and a week extra to make. Productivity is a factor of technology and not so much as human effort. Communication is done through slotting it in our calendars rather than walking across cabins. Is growth then at the cost of human engagement?

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler’s studies state that personal influence is a short-range phenomenon, dissipating entirely at three degrees of remove from the person who exercises it. This has implications for business, where the success of campaigns to foster, say, creativity or worker safety may hinge on enlisting employees to influence colleagues’ behavior.

Somewhere, the enduring culture that earlier defined the firm and its people gets mooted and so do the emotive qualities of association with the firm. The firm is no longer a cohesively tight knit version of a social family; rather, the ties are stretched to accommodate more claims to the same social structure and the family makes way for a larger, loosely bound social network where colleagues define the intensity of closeness or familiarity with each other as the founding columns of the organization’s ethos. Culture then becomes a melting pot of collective congruity.

Work environment that is no longer under direct control of the senior management becomes vulnerable to exploitative emotions, political energies and the segregation of the individual effort in favour of collaborative thought.

At this stage, creating a circle of influencers within the firm’s setup helps the leadership of the firm oversee and control the reins of the firms better. These select people lend stability to the firm and help define and give direction to the firm’s work environment as well value systems that hold the firm together. In the absence of this elite circle, the firm operates as an entity independent of its employees, an event that can wreak havoc on the firm’s long term plans and company’s future.

The urge to seize every opportunity to expand is understandable, but in your quest to surge ahead, are you taking your employees along with you? Are you sharing your vision, your goals with them to the extent that they fully understand your approach to reach them? Who will you for increased attrition when the firm goes through a phase of transition/change or even accelerated growth?

Or are you expecting your circle of “influencers” to prep up the employees to follow suit while you focus on growing the company big. Even though it is the Leadership team’s responsibility to groom the subsequent layers of authority to be the microcosm of the firm’s ideologies, how many times is it actually done?

My contention is that there are certain things that, even in the frenziest of times, need to taken care of, like the expected organization-wide inertia in tackling changes and the need to be patient when things demand so. The biggest reason why an organization grows is because the human effort behind it is in full synch with the shared vision. Again quoting Nicholas Christakis’s study of 3 Degrees of Influence mentioned above, unless an organization has tremendous faith in the layers of its senior management to effectively transmit organizational cues down to the lower levels, it is really up to them to engage at all levels and to ensure that they “carry” the firm along with them. Reluctance or omission to do so could make the firm looks like a truck running on bicycle wheels. The vehicle does move but obviously not at the right pace nor with the right machinery.

Do people, then- in the pursuit of greater excellence- become inexplicably expendable? Or are they just an unfortunate casualty in the search of bigger bottom lines?

We at Positive Moves help you understand and pre-empt human resource needs by deciphering your human resource dynamics and the processes under which they operate in your firm. Our firm not only helps identify the right talent from a cultural context, we also try and ensure that this is a long term association for both the employee and the employer.