Policy Development During Growing Pains

When an organization begins to experience growing pains, one of the most common reasons for this is that the existing infrastructure no longer supports the current offerings. While sometimes this comes down to poor management, at the end of the day, growing pains can be extremely difficult to predict until one is in the middle of everything. Additionally, since challenges like this are a part of a businesses growth,  experiencing problems such as this should actually be viewed as a good thing.

However, not properly addressing things at this juncture could cause all of your hard fought gains to disappear. If growing pains are allowed to degenerate, they can become substantial problems down the road. This can create chaos, poisoning the company culture, and resulting in the potential loss of key employees. Going too far down this path can result in a death spiral.

What needs to happen at this juncture (the sooner the better), is a policy review process. This five step approach is designed to help you quickly review each policy and improve it to adequately address the issues at hand.

Review: Look over all of your policies, starting off with the ones that are in the most troublesome areas. Be sure to take input from everyone involved: this type of review will help you to not only get a thorough examination of everything, but also will help you to more effectively implement policy changes due to the buy-in that you are giving to everyone.

Analyze: Try to identify all of the parts of the policy that are working (plan to retain these). Everything that is not working properly (from marginally to substantially) should be the focus of revision.

Revise: With the focus on where you are going, rewrite your policies with your long term goals in mind. It is very possible that some of your policies might not be able to be crafted effectively here, since there might need to be some intermediary phases. 

A likely tension will exist between where your ultimate goals are and what you need in the coming months and years. After all, this is a part of the reason why you are in your situation. To get the policies just right for today and the near to medium term, it will most likely be an art, not a science. You may need to do multiple revisions in order to get it right.

Implement: Once you believe you have the revisions at a stage that will be beneficial for you today, immediately implement. If you enable the review process to be collaborative, you will likely be able to implement things much more easily since everyone will feel like they had a part in the process.

Assess: Once implemented, immediately assess how the policy review process is going. In a perfect world, this assessment process will be quick, and the policy will be sufficient for your needs. However, because of the stage your business is in, be prepared to repeat this process, possibly multiple times.

At this point, three big things need to be emphasized. First, don’t try to get things perfect. You need a solution that works as well as helps you move forward. I have seen way too often people preoccupied with getting things just right. The result was paralysis, and an inability to move forward. The end result was that things went nowhere fast, and all momentum was lost.

Second, don’t just rush to fix a problem as fast as possible. I once worked with a person who felt that the muse would come on them and inspire them. Ideas flowed from them. Usually, idea factories like this lack the plans for implementation, with some of the ideas being downright awful or half baked. Follow the process, with the focus being on working quickly and efficiently to develop all of your ideas.

Finally, make sure that you include everyone you can in this process. Top down approaches in this area might work, but it will likely cause our people to not feel as invested in the process as you need them to be for it to work. As the leader, remember that your front line workers have a perspective that you do not have. If you insist on having the right answers all of the time, don’t be surprised when your people disengage and start to leave.