Do you have the skills you need?
- What skills will the business need at twice its current size that it doesn’t have today?
- Which of your current team members were hired to perform tasks or support needs that the business has already outgrown?
- Is there a capability gap you’ve been working around with stopgap or temporary solutions, rather than solving structurally?
- If a key growth initiative stalled tomorrow, would it be a strategy problem or a capability problem?
Are you really delegating?
- Looking at your top five recurring responsibilities, have you handed off the task, or the decision?
- How many things that you consider “delegated” still end with your personal approval?
- Which would you need to trust about a person or process to actually let go of a decision you currently control?
- What decision did you personally make this week that someone else on your team should have made?
- What would change if you weren’t there? Which of these things should happen now?
- What’s the cost – to you and the company – of the things you haven’t delegated yet?
Who owns the outcome?
- Could you name the person who owns the outcome for each major function in your business?
- Which things end up with you because ownership was never clearly assigned?
- What decision gets made slowest in your business, and is that a people problem or a structure problem?
Are you staffing for where you’re going?
- What are the next two or three planned hires? Will these help you get where you’re headed, or are you just addressing current problems?
- How often do you hire proactively, ahead of a need, rather than reactively?
- What role have you been avoiding filling, and what is that avoidance actually costing you?
What does good performance look like?
- For each key role, could you describe what “doing well” looks like based on outcomes, not effort? Could the person in the role?
- Do you know who on your team is actually driving results?
- What performance problem have you been tolerating because addressing it felt harder than living with it?
Are you building a culture for growth?
- What would make your strongest people leave? How imminent are these conditions?
- Are you developing people for the roles you’ll need in two years, or only hiring for the problems you have today?
- Would your team’s standards and culture hold up if your team doubled in size?
- How would your team and roles differ if you were building your company from scratch today?
Want more information on growing your business
Watch the video or read the full post to learn more about how to make your business more resilient, so you’re better prepared to grow
Other key elements in building a business for growth:
- Understand what real growth looks like and how your business can achieve it (post and key questions)
- Learn more about the other elements that are key to a business built to last (post and key questions)
