Organizational Intention from the Start

As a founder or leader in a newer organization you'll have countless responsibilities on your plate. Each person wears many hats, and it can feel like each person's role changes or evolves on a constant and frequent basis.

In those early days, it can be so easy to get totally wrapped up in the product, service, or whatever the core of the 'thing' that your business generates revenue from. When the team is small it's easy and natural for everyone to be aligned, for communication to be clear, and for everyone to be working toward a common mission without much intention.

That won't last for long.

Before you know it you're adding people, starting to specialize functions, and without intention in defining your culture and the identity of your organization, the cracks will start to show very, very quickly.

These cracks become distractions. These distractions are a time suck of time where you're trying to figure things out on the fly. Your culture isn't being served and your results start to suffer to the core work of the business.

It can feel impossible or even just down right unnecessary to put intention into defining your culture in those early days. With that investment thought, you can set your business off on the right foot and be prepared to take on the challenges of your growth. An organization that has placed intention to their culture at the start will be able to bend under the weight of scale but they will not break.

You can wait until you're at about five people on your team, but once you're at just that few in headcount, you will be well served to start to define the 'who' of your organization.

‘Flawed 5’ - things you can do to set your organization off on the right foot from the start:

1 - Create values that actually mean something

The smaller you are, the more this process will rely on the founder to craft this vision, but it really should include voices of anyone on the team. These need to be real values that can be lived. It can be easy to create aspiration values, but they need to be values that your team can use as an anchor to make decisions as you grow. If you want to be able to scale quickly, you'll need a team equipped to be able to make decisions in line with the vision of the organizations. Values provide this north star.

The benefit of values that mean something being in place is that, as you grow, your team can lean into these values to drive their decision. As a founder or early leader in a fast growing organization, you’ll be able to save your precious mental capacity for the highest level functions that will continue to propel the business forward. Values can serve the one off ‘first time’ considerations of the minute of the day to day work as you grow and are growing your team.

2 - Define how decisions are made

In the early days, this typically always falls to the founder. As you grow though, you'll quickly need to rely on the team at large to be able to make decisions within their area of expertise. Clearly setting up what the expectations are will be very important. Equally important will be to define who will make the final call in moments where there isn't consensus. This will save everyone a lot of time and headache trying to battle it out in the moment.

As you start to scale, decisions can be made quicker. By investing in this work early, you can save the time and headache of having to hit pause to figure out how you will even approach big decisions. Values will be a huge part of this as well, but the logistics of how to even tackle a decision will be important. When those are defined early you and your team will be able to stay in the more creative and iterative headspace vs getting bogged down in the operations of the scale.

3 - Clarify what good communication looks like

You'll think you have great communication in the beginning, but it will only really be because everyone is within actual or virtual headshot to be a part of every bit of dialogue. As you grow that quickly becomes improbable and then impossible. Being clear on what needs to be communicated, who needs to be included, and the way in which communication should happen will help set up the conditions for partnered support across functions as you grow.

Communication can go sideways really quickly, especially as more voices are added into the conversation. When you have clarity around how communication happens, you can integrate it into the on-boarding process and integrate all new people with the same intention. As they bring their unique perspective, a grounding of how communication happens will help ensure that these unique voices all have the capacity to be heard and that they are also listening. This should help drive more intentional collaboration out of the gate and over time.

4 - Put time into HR basics, including systems, job descriptions

This might seem almost absurd in those early days, but trying to figure this stuff out as you're growing will become a headache nearly impossible to shake. Even if a person's role is evolving monthly or every few months, the organization is still served by making it clear what is on their plate, who they report to, and the type of freedom they have and are encouraged to take to evolve their role. This also can help serve as a great way to evolve responsibilities by evaluating when work needs to be taken off of one plate and a whole new plate set at the table.

This is the one that is most likely to get put to the back burner, and subsequently the one that will take the largest amount of time to invest in the moment if you wait until you ‘need’ to be mindful of the considerations. Whatever your product or service, as you grow you will be increasingly more equipped if you’re bringing people in that are clear on the value of culture from the start. This helps support balance and integration and saves a lot of headache for future leaders and creates an overall stronger ecosystem for growth.

5 - Set intention to your personal leadership

At the start you may not have a 'leadership team' but you will have leadership. As a founder, define how you lead, how you communicate, and how you give and expect feedback will help to demystify how you'll engage in the growth process across the board. Write this down, review and evolve it often, and continue to iterate until you've aligned in the best version of yourself. This work then becomes a foundation upon which other leaders can build and model their leadership as the team is built out.

Flying by the seat of your pants may be thrilling, and honestly sometimes necessary, in those early days. It will bite you in the ass hard before you know it. People need not only a clear vision on the business from their leaders, especially the founder, but they need to know what to expect from your presence. This will help them better engage and partner with you. Founders often underestimate the power differential perceived by all new employees of their business, and assume that they’re more approachable than they are. This intention makes it clear exactly who you are as a leader and provides an explicit invitation to connection. If you want to create an organization that can grow without you having to hold all the strings, define how you lead and continue to evolve and be intentional with communicating this.

Take it forward

How you start is how you’ll go. Make the time and put in the work at the start. You'll have better outcomes out of the gate and be well equipped to take on the challenge of your growth as it happens. There is nothing more distracting than having to figure out how work happens as you need it to happen. Do the work up front and set your growing organization up for success.