As companies grow and scale, injecting accountability structures into the culture becomes critical. As Peter Drucker famously said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Currently, two of the most popular goal setting frameworks are John Doerr’s Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) method and Gino Wickman’s Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS).

One of the hot topics of 2023 in boardrooms and around leadership tables continues to be remote work. The pandemic is over, but companies are still struggling to attract their talent back to the office full time. I am often asked about the state of remote work and when this trend will end. (Spoiler alert: it will not.)

We created The Growth Gauntlet to help leaders build high performing and sustainable organizations. The framework charts the evolution of our Six Imperatives: Sharpen Focus, Calibrate Culture, Strengthen Leadership, Elevate Talent, Align Structure and Amplify Communication across four Stages of High Growth: Emerge, Operationalize, Grow, Explore & Expand. Over the years we have used this framework to guide investors and leaders in their growth journeys. Read more to learn a few of the ways that we have used the framework.

“Structure follows strategy” is my mantra. Organizational structures, processes and systems exist to help you achieve your strategy. They provide clarity of roles and boundaries between functions. Processes are designed to advance work through the organization and push it out to clients/customers. Systems help us to track and measure progress so that we can optimize performance.

Your organization can’t outperform its talent. As you grow and your organization becomes more complex, it becomes necessary to level up your talent. Current employees may need to step up into new responsibilities and new hires with different skills will be required. There are essentially three ways to elevate your team.

When a company is moving between stages of growth, strategic goals and desired results become more complex and difficult to reach. They often move in a different direction or require different skills and capabilities for the organization. In these times, culture needs to shift to support and drive success.

Sharpening your focus seems obvious enough, but when your company has multiple opportunities and a host of growth-related challenges it can be hard to do. Plus, how you go about sharpening your focus changes at each stage of a company’s growth.

Our practice has largely focused on high growth companies who have raised capital from private equity investors. High growth businesses, particularly those that are private equity backed, have an added dimension of complexity - limited time and resources. The PE investment brings the resources (the carrot), but also brings with it time bound goals for achieving the return (the stick). The investment acts as the catalyst for the business to move to the next level of growth. As we worked with these companies fighting to grow and build a sustainable organization quickly, we realized that the stage of growth a company is in is very important context

Growth is hard. Taking an idea from inception and turning it into a stable, predictable, sustainable double-digit year over year high growth company is one of the most exciting and excruciating challenges a leader will face.

Innovate or die. The accelerated pace of technology disruption is putting companies under increasing pressure to innovate. But many companies miss the fact that there are two kinds of innovation and to win, you need to be good at both

I have worked with many companies who have described their culture first and foremost as “a family.” What they generally mean is that they greatly value the relationships that they have with their colleagues at work. Though there is nothing wrong with building strong relationships with your colleagues, I have found over the years that the “family” culture has a dark side – a lack of accountability.

We have all been swept up in a tsunami of change that hit us hard and fast and has left us disoriented, exhausted, and with miles and miles to swim before we’re back on dry land. As we look to the horizon and plot our course, we can expect to navigate this crisis in three phases.

If your company is growing rapidly, then this book is for you! Blitzscaling is loosely defined as the playbook for “building a dominant world-leading business in record time.” Most importantly, Blitzscaling requires prioritizing “speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty.”

I was recently in a Board Governance Committee meeting discussing expanding the board. The CEO presented us with a list of possible candidates and asked, “Who on this list should we add?” Cue my mantra: “structure follows strategy.”