Every corporate, public, or non-governmental organization spend a large amount of their time looking for growth. Growth by itself is not healthy if it is not sustainable; the pre-crisis era witnessed an unexpected growth in several markets, but only organizations that thought their sustainable growth wisely and did not rely on external factors and luck to impact the bottom line, are the ones that are still on an upward trend even during the toughest times.
When observing those organizations closely, we notice that they all share three similar principles:
Hire Great people: Often when companies hire someone, they replace another position, fill a gap, or create a new position to follow the company’s growth or serve the corporate strategy; all of those is done in a rush or sense of urgency. However hiring people should not be based on urgency for the following reason: Whenever hiring is linked to urgency, the position will be filled with the best candidate; best out of what? You guessed right best out of those who applied or those who were headhunted. The case should be different; we should map out our corporate strategy and decide on the key people needed for the coming 3 to 5 years and start looking for those people. We will know exactly what profiles we are looking for and should only hire the people that have more than a 90% match to that profile. At the end of the day we want to have people with responsibilities not people with mere jobs.
Turn the systems into a culture: To start with, any organization that is aiming for sustainable growth should create a set of systems, in a way that responsibilities are distributed and agreed upon with the Human Capital Talents. Those responsibilities should not be owned by certain persons, but by a team of people, in a way that the organization does not become dependent on people but systems. One common characteristic of leaders, is that they groom other leaders; take the example of Texas Instruments (TI) CEO Jerry Junkins who died from a heart attack while on a business trip to Europe. Junkins was known to be the person that reshaped TI and brought unexpected growth to the company. As Junkins was a great leader he made sure to groom people around him and Tom Engibous who was the head of the semiconductor unit became CEO and continued the growth path. Note if Junkins was a solo player, his whole organization would have suffered of his absence.
Once we create the systems and make sure that those are our greatness systems, we have to turn them into a culture, by adding an accountability factor to each responsibility, making the whole organization live that culture.
Never stop asking questions: The secret of great CEOs or heads of organizations is that they always seek to learn, asking questions and not taking things for granted. On the other hand companies that were once growing and started declining rapidly are companies that became arrogant and took things for granted. By asking questions, the leadership team should have a set goal of either increasing innovation, or reviewing the organizational Critical Success Factors.
Camil El Khoury
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