We look at how business growth can affect the quality of your product from an internal culture perspective; and offer some pointers on how to manage it.
By Eduardo de Felipe
3 min read | 19 Jun 2022
When premium quality is your main business driver, ‘growth’ can be a contentious goal.
Anyone who has ever transitioned a small boutique business into a fully-muscled venture is aware of how excruciating this journey can be, especially when your goal is to improve – or even maintain – the quality of your product.
But growth can wear many masks, so defining what it means – for you, for your team and for your business – as well as identifying and activating the rituals that trigger that growth, will have a huge influence on your business performance, as it will have on the motivations of the people involved in delivering that growth.
And this last point is important, because for those of you who lead a talent-based organization, the chances of success at growing your business are directly related to the individual motivations of your team. They are the ones who deliver the quality. So you better pay attention to them.
Generating a healthy business growth without compromising the quality of the product requires considering at least three qualitative growth pillars – all crafted around our teams – that, on their own, have the ability to create value that can be then turned into numbers. Or money.
Creating a strong culture means generating a trustworthy working environment where different sensitivities are aligned around a shared understanding of purpose, which in return, generates a strong sense of belonging. A strong sense of belonging improves the levels of motivation, and since motivation is key to improve business performance and therefore generate more and better value, we can easily determine that investing in culture is a valid strategy for quality business growth.
Take two companies with teams the same size and experience. Give one team the possibility to keep learning and developing on an ongoing basis. Do nothing with the other. Which team do you believe will create more and better value? And which company will be more valuable? It is obvious, isn't it? Yet worryingly enough, training and education seem to be amongst the first corners to be cut when growth is driven just by numbers.
Growth means change and change requires flexibility. Flexible conditions help teams adapt better to new conditions and improve their overall performance. This is why protecting flexibility is so critical when you want to grow as a business whilst maintaining the quality.
Sure, we could list more. However, get these three implemented and you will be in a healthy spot to set your focus on the numbers. Ignore them, and you might achieve growth at the expense of your quality. Or even worse, at the expense of your team. Or even worse, at the expense of your business.