What’s keeping your business from its next stage of growth?

Your business will grow or be limited by the structures you create.

THINK ON IT: What’s keeping your business from its next stage of growth?

"The Great One," legendary hockey player Wayne Gretzky once said, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." 

Great hockey strategy. Great business advice.

If your business is growing, it's changing — or will soon need to. The question is, will you be skating in advance of the puck or trying to chase it from behind?

In his classic Harvard Business Review article on organizational change, Larry Greiner outlines five phases of organizational growth:

• Creativity. Individualistic and entrepreneurial, management is focused on making and selling.

• Direction. Management is highly directive and focused on efficiency of operations.

• Delegation. Management delegates to expand the firm's market.

• Coordination. Management provides oversight with a primary focus on consolidation.

• Collaboration. Management is participative and focused on problem solving and innovation.

To get to the next stage of growth requires a fundamental change of structure. Oftentimes the same executive team that created the structure for the firm's present phase must have the foresight and courage to dismantle it for the next.

Can you identify which stage of growth your organization is in now? And what's the next phase of your firm's growth? Are you already designing the new structures that you'll need to get you there? 

If not, what’s holding you back from embracing change? 

“The critical task for management in each revolutionary period is to find a new set of organizational practices that will become the basis for managing the next period of organizational growth." — Larry Greiner

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