What kind of growth is most beneficial for your team in this season?
As the leader, give yourself and your team permission to reframe the concept of growth for your organization. Growth can either be:
- deep (improving your organization), or
- wide (increasing the size or your organization)
I have often made the mistake of thinking about, and therefore communicating, the concept of growth in terms of its width (increasing the size of an organization). By default, my excitement, motivation, and ultimate goal for growth is attached to its numbers, to its reach.
Let’s face it, as leaders we love to enlarge the organizations we lead. We congratulate ourselves and usually receive the biggest accolades from others when our growth is wide, when gross revenues soar or our organization adds a significant number of staff. We are impressed to hear of the big CEOs, “She took the company from 50 million to 500 million in revenue,” or “He took the ministry from one location to 30 worldwide.” We rarely hear, “He strengthened the company vision, and now they are postured to expand.” So naturally, we become fixated on growth to mean growth in width (or size) and that’s what we celebrate.
As leaders we must recognize the value of depth as well. Some seasons we may not grow in size because the team is not ready, for example, or the market is not ripe. These are ideal times to focus on improvements, or growing deep and tending to our roots.
Wise leaders know there is a season for different kinds of growth. If your organization needs to slow down its outward growth and go deep, don’t be afraid to do that in the season ahead.
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