What are the greatest challenges growth company leaders will be struggling with in 2017?
- Finding the talents to boost the growth
- Making the business global once local success is proven
- Securing the financing to take the business to the next level
- Making time consuming internal communication more efficient
- Once the growth is taking off, establishing processes that are fun yet effective
This is what we found in tens of inspiring discussions with growth leaders in the Slush2016 event held in cold but amazing Finland in November. While chatting with these forward-looking people, we used our own InnoDuel tool to collect the growth leaders’ wisdom into a ranking list, above showing the Top 5 results.
Our company is also a growth company and the Top 5 ranking list could be our own. It was good to hear how similarly we growth leaders experience the world. In fact, we are an ad-hoc community facing the same questions, challenges and opportunities.
How to turn challenges into opportunities
What is most inspiring about the ranking is that they are not merely challenges that hinder growth, the greatest opportunities lie in these challenges. Our own actions can make a big difference.
Since we live in a world of sharing, I thought it’s fair to share our solution to turn the top 5 challenges into success stories. This solution is based on an idea of scalable leadership that is essentially a way to break leadership down into tangible actions.
Proposal:
Involve your employees in those decisions that impact their daily work. Involving employees means that you listen actively and communicate crisply.
Create a systematic and efficient way of doing this.
Benefits: Your employees
- Love to have a clear, systematic and easy method to reach out to you and influence the decisions made in your company. No shame in being open about how you can be influenced.
- Start to see a clear link between their input and your decisions as you “productize” the involvement method. Your communication plays an important role to create a link between your employees’ actions and your own.
- Appreciate you listening to them and making decisions based on their input. Your employees’ need to see their great ideas being implemented. When they see that happening, it will have a positive impact on your company and business.
- Become more inspired and, thus, help you to achieve your business goals. Decisions made based on employees’ input will inspire them to commit to the decisions.
- Will say good things about you and your company, which will help to attract and hire more great talent. Not even the best marketing message can measure up to the authentic experience of a happy employee.
Why should you try it?
To have a story to tell to your potential investors. A story about a company with a great team, culture, trust and scalable leadership, ready to take the business to the next level.
Be inspired – I am, every single day.
