Making the transition from an ambitious start-up into a fully-fledged business is a huge step. Neil Edwards explains how a People Director can help make it happen.

When businesses grow, they need to evolve and change their way of working. In people terms, it’s usually somewhere between the headcount of 20 to 50 employees when the first changes need to take place and new approach to management needs to be introduced. It’s this critical transition that many business owners find challenging. It’s where they start to lose control of day-to-day aspects of the running of their business, and some find they start to lose the things that made them successful in the first place. As businesses continue to grow, other similar changes typically need to be introduced to balance the right level of control with the optimum level of empowerment.

To manage this, business owners need to identify what makes their company successful, and crucially, work out how to scale that up when they grow.

This is more difficult than it sounds, as often, it’s the business owner themselves who are the key to success, and without them, the business is unlikely to survive. But there’s only so much a start-up can grow before the owner will need other people who can do some of that for them.

It’s about knowing which levers to pull.

This is where a People Director can have a big impact. When I go into businesses to help them scale up, I usually find there are several levers available – those which you decide to pull and to what extent will depend on the business – it’s different for everyone. But they usually consist of:

1. Developing a greater sense of ownership from the rest of the team
2. Empowering others to make decisions.
3. Seeing opportunity in uncertainty

Ownership

Business owners are often decisive, good at networking and have ambition for the business. As the business grows, they’ll need their leadership team to have the same sense of ownership that they have themselves.

Empowerment

Part of giving others a sense of ownership is empowering others to do what you do. This means moving from a controlling to an enabling mindset in daily operations.

What is a controlling mindset? In my experience, it’s when the business owner needs to sign off everything. Nothing gets done when they’re out of office because decisions can’t be made. They lack sufficient trust in others to make that decision for them.

Decision making is very difficult to delegate, as it is giving away what makes you, you. Relinquishing control is often the hardest thing for a business owner to do. How comfortable would you be with someone making a different decision to what you would have done? We build leaders awareness of this by coaching. We ask those searching questions as leaders go through real-life situations. We show them how to equip others to make those decisions and take day-to-day control of business.

Creating opportunity 

Entrepreneurs see uncertainty and spot opportunities in it, often by intuition. If you can build greater communication and transparency around your own vision for the business and empower others in your team to do the same, you will create more opportunities. These are powerful characteristics in an entrepreneurial organisation.

Building trust with your team members and empowering them to make important decisions with the right motivations, you then start to build the same level of ambition that you have into the rest of the organisation.

If you are unsure or not confident in your colleagues to make the right decisions it could be because they’re just not the right person or not sat in the right seat. A People Director can help you decide if the people you currently have are right for the organisation and help to identify any gaps around capability. A People Director works as more of a trusted advisor than an employee. We can bring the outside perspective to help shine a light on the areas of your business that need strengthening and what needs to change. Crucially, we can say things that a colleague may not feel able to.

I can’t overemphasize the importance of building capability and trust in your senior team to fulfil an ambitious business plan. In my next article, I’ll look at the practical ways in which a People Director can help a growing business succeed.

The impact an empowered employee with true ownership over their role, can have on the successful growth of a business is undeniable. If you would like to find out more about how a part-time People Director can help embed these behaviours in your business, call 0345 646 5201.