Editorial
Even in the best of circumstances, seamless company-wide coordination and cooperation can be challenging. Stir in the context of rapid growth, and effective collaboration can feel downright elusive.
Everything changes with growth: New people bring to the organization new skills, new perspectives, new possibilities and the potential for powerful new relationships. Creating and filling new positions means organizational charts, work flows and meeting rosters need to be reimagined and reconfigured.
These shifts involve an endless stream of variables to consider and important conversations to hold. While it can be difficult to make the time for these critical considerations, skipping them undercuts the long-term success of the enterprise by creating silos and entrenching a lackluster culture.
As your company experiences rapid growth, it’s essential to recognize that effective collaboration is not just a "nice to have," but a "must do." The future of your organization hinges on the ability and willingness of your people to work together.
So how do you build and maintain effective collaboration amid rapid growth? Here’s real advice from organizational leaders who have made it through the gauntlet while prioritizing collaboration along the way.
1. Design Your Rhythm of Collaboration
Jim Kalbach is Chief Evangelist for Mural, which makes digital whiteboard software that enables remote visual collaboration. Mural faced sudden, jaw-dropping growth driven by the pandemic-fueled need for people to find new ways to work together: In barely more than a year, the company grew from 100 people to about 900, support tickets skyrocketed from 300 per week to 3000 per week, revenue quintupled, and the company received an influx of over $200 million in investment capital.
To collaborate effectively amid such rapid expansion, Kalbach said, leaders should take a beat to design the organization’s “rhythm of collaboration.” How frequently does a given team need to meet? How often does it make sense for different teams to come together to learn from each other and to coordinate their respective work? How often do all-hands meetings really need to take place?
Some touch points will be intense but infrequent, like the driving rhythm of a bass drum. Others will be more frequent and less intense, like the steady tap of the snare. Intentionally layering these rhythms helps everyone in the organization stay informed, sequence contributions, learn from each other, and contribute meaningfully.
Related Article: Building and Leading Collaborative Teams
2. Double Down on the Basics
Rapid expansion has the potential to generate new work, loads of excitement and a general sense of busyness. Amid the hustle and bustle, it’s easy to get lax on the basic good behaviors of working together.
Sarah Karp is a senior design manager at Atlassian. “When under pressure to move fast, it’s tempting to push team practices to the backburner,” Karp said. “This ends up slowing us down and introducing more risks to the business. When we prioritize team practices like project kickoffs or roles and responsibilities workshops, we find that our people and our business are all the better for it.” The solution: double down on the basics of working together.
3. Hire People Who Can Work With Ambiguity
Mike Basso, CEO of Sales Talent Command, spent a significant chunk of his career leading through mergers and acquisitions. He was charged with blending the sales teams of previously distinct organizations. He joined one startup right after it had raised 25 million and began to scale dramatically, within a year doubling the size of the company and increasing revenue 400%.
“Post series A companies aren't for everybody,” Basso said, reflecting on the scale up. “You are looking at long hours. You don't have support systems. You don't have support staff. You wear many hats.”
The best way to cope, he suggested: Hire for people who can handle that ambiguity in both their own and others’ work. Afterall, all their collaborators will likewise be feeling their way through the muck and will make missteps along the way.
4. Answer, 'What’s in It for Me?'
Rapid expansion is stressful. One way to help individuals weather that stress is to clarify how their needs and interests will be served along the way.
“Anytime I came in and took over a team, I spent a lot of time and effort in the beginning to sit down one on one with everyone,” Basso said. “I wanted to really learn who people were, what their dreams and aspirations were, what their skills were, what they wanted to do, where they saw themselves in several years.”
He added, “You need to help paint the picture on how being more closely integrated into the company and having better collaboration will actually help them get where they want to go.”
Understanding “What’s in it for me?,” helps motivate constructive engagement, even during tough periods.
5. Anticipate the Future Need for Documentation
Rapid growth, of course, isn’t unique to the for-profit sector. Kimberly Olsen is executive director of New York City Arts in Education Roundtable, a nonprofit organization for arts educators that had to make big changes in the first year of the pandemic. One of the big challenges she faced: institutionalizing knowledge.
“Because of how I came into this role, a lot of information simply just lived with me. Information wasn't necessarily written down in ways that could be shared across staff members,” Olsen explained. “It's been a matter of intentionally building those systems, and creating space to acknowledge we haven't had a way of doing this.”
No matter where your organization is in its developmental journey, begin capturing how work gets done to enable people to align with others and to get their work done with as little guesswork as possible. That doesn’t mean creating overly convoluted, proscriptive, or heavy documentation for every process imaginable, but think about what future team members might find helpful to get up and running quickly.
Might a basic workflow be useful? A two-minute video walkthrough of the folder architecture on the shared drive? An org chart, or even just a list of key contact numbers? Documentation doesn’t need to be dense to be useful.
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Kalbach described the growing pains Mural encountered with an absence of documentation. “Prior to growth we were just trying to survive,” he said. “We had to fight for every win. We were all wearing multiple hats and then some. We were not thinking about documenting approaches or creating processes…Then, all of a sudden, there were entire teams and swaths of the company that didn't exist just a couple months ago. 800 new people looked at us and said, Where's the process for this? Where's the documentation for that? How do you guys do it here?”
“We were like, follow us,” Kalbach said. “That was all we could say.”
Related Article: A Collaborative Culture is Within Reach. Here's How
6. Embrace Identity Transitions
As Olsen onboarded professional staff for the first time in the organization’s 30-year history, she experienced an important identity shift.
“Now that I had a team to share the load with, there was a part of me that felt like I wasn’t doing enough because I wasn't doing all the things that I had gotten used to,” she said. “Over time, I was able to shift more into the role that I should have been doing. I was able to put my time into the things that actually needed my attention, so that we are able to think about sustainability beyond this period of growth. We were able to be more forward-thinking, as opposed to being more responsive in the moment.”
Embracing the role and identity transitions that often come with rapid growth creates the conditions for others to contribute their talents to the shared work. By moving aside and learning when to let go, leaders can enable teams’ ability to collaborate.
7. Learn From Others
Some people, like Basso, have been through the expansion gauntlet multiple times. But any rapid growth period is always someone’s first time through. As a newcomer to leading amid organizational growth, Olsen found tremendous value in her relationships with others.
“I'm grateful to work with people on my board who have gone through transitions like this [before] or who have been doing this type of work for many years,” Olsen said. “Mentorship from colleagues in the field has been a light through all of this.”
Rather than trying to go it alone, reach out to ask for sounding board conversations. Ask for advice. Learn what others have tried, not only within your organization but also in communities of your peers worldwide. As Olsen pointed out, “There are now so many virtual spaces that I'm able to plug into with fellow executive directors.”
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