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822. Growth Exposes What Success Lets You Ignore · Daily Influence

• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to Daily Influence, your daily dose of positive influence.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Brian Smith founder of IA Business Advisors and co-author of the Iain team series.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Each day we share stories and insights to help you find be and build your influence in a positive and responsible way.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm Greg Kleeneau, partner at IA Business Advisors, and co-host of Daily Influence.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Be sure to follow, subscribe, and share Daily Influence with someone who could use a little extra positivity today.
• 0:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And make us part of your daily routine, whether it's during your commute on a walk or an quiet moment just for you, because you're influenced matters.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hey, everybody, Brian Smith here with the IAM team series and your Daily Influence.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is an interesting thing that happens when a business is successful, success can hide a lot of problems.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: When revenue is growing, customers are happy and opportunity keeps coming through the door.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: We can convince ourselves that the organization is working exactly the way it
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes good people are compensating for bad processes, sometimes a founder is personally holding together things that should have become systems years ago.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes communication works because everybody still knows everybody in.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes we're succeeding because a handful of people are putting in an extra ordinary amount of effort just to keep everything moving forward.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Growth has a way of exposing all of that.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Because what worked when you were smaller, doesn't necessarily work.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: when you have more people, more customers, more locations, more complexity, and more at stake.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: So today, I want to talk about something I see regularly in growing organizations, including ours, growth exposes what success lets you ignore.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And at some point, intentional leadership,
• 2:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: has to become organizational capability.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So one of the dangerous assumptions we make in business is that if we're getting good results, we must have good systems.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Those aren't necessarily the same thing.
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: We can have tremendous results because you have tremendous people.
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can have people who remember everything solve problems before anybody notices them, stay late, answer their phone
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: and constantly fill gaps around them, and because the work gets done, leadership may never see the weakness underneath it.
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: That works until it doesn't.
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: One person leaves, volume increases, you add another location, you acquire another company.
• 2:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: A major customer comes aboard suddenly, the informal system can't absorb the complexity at
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's when leaders sometimes say growth creates the problem, but growth may not have created it at all.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: The problem was already there.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Success simply gave us the ability to ignore it.
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what did growth do?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: It exposed the problem.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Part of responsible influence has been willing
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Are we succeeding because our organization is designed well, or because good people are compensating for the places where it isn't?
• 3:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Those are two very different organizations.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there are behaviors that are incredibly valuable when an organization is small.
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: The owner makes most of the decisions.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everybody talks directly to everybody else.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And roles can overlap.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Processes live in people's heads.
• 3:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: problems get solved through relationships instead of systems, and that flexibility may actually be part of what made the company successful.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: But as you grow, those same strengths can become constraints.
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: If every important decision still needs the founder, the founder becomes a bottleneck.
• 4:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: If everybody owns everything, eventually nobody knows who is accountable for what or where or when
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if communication depends on relationships, information begins getting lost as the organization expands.
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if your processes live inside your best employees, you're not building organizational knowledge, you're building dependency.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's why maturity in an organization requires us to periodically challenge the things that have worked, not because they were wrong, because the
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is something we talk about through smart management.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Structure shouldn't exist simply to create bureaucracy.
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Structure should create clarity.
• 4:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Who owns it?
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: How do we do it?
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: How do we measure it?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: How do people know what's expected of them?
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And how do we make good execution repeatable without requiring somebody to save the day?
• 5:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: growth requires us to convert individual capability into organizational capability.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we talk a lot on daily influence about intentional leadership and having responsible influence.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there's another stage to that conversation.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Eventually, your leadership has to become bigger than you.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: If the organization only behaves according to
• 5:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: If people only make good decisions when they ask you first, you haven't really empowered them.
• 5:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: If accountability only happens when you personally intervene, you haven't built accountability into the organization.
• 5:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if clarity only comes from conversations with leaders, you haven't created organizational clarity.
• 6:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the transition leaders have to make as organizations grow.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: your influence has to move into the organization itself.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: It becomes part of how positions are defined, how decisions are made, how people communicate, how performances measured, how accountability happens, and ultimately how people influence one another.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's where find be and build your influence become more than an individual leadership philosophy.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: You find your influence.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: You become intentional about how you use it.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And then you build that influence into the people and systems around you.
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's how an organization becomes capable of growing beyond the individual leader.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: So take a look at your organization today and ask yourself a different question.
• 6:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Don't just ask our least successful ask, what is our current success allowing us to ignore?
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where are exceptional people compensating for weak systems?
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And where are you still personally holding something together that the organization should be capable of doing without you?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And if your business doubled tomorrow, what would break first?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Those answers aren't necessarily signs that you've done something wrong.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: They may simply be signs that you've outgrown something that once worked.
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Growth doesn't always create our problems, sometimes growth simply makes them impossible to ignore.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: So intentional leadership means recognizing that and building an organization capable of carrying the influence, clarity, responsibility, and accountability forward, even when you're not in the room.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're all influencing.
• 7:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we are all responsible for the influence that we have in our organizations.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for joining me today on daily influence.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And I hope you have a great day.