What It Means to Be an Organizationally Young Company

Sergey Zolkin (via Unsplash)

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in business. If your company is organizationally young, it may not be ready for the change you’re asking a strategist to help you make. And that’s one of the most frustrating aspects of consulting work.

Organizationally young companies are reactive. Responsibilities may be unclear, processes may live in people’s heads, and follow-through depends heavily on individual effort. They operate like scrappy startups. Often, good ideas fall apart when the people responsible for carrying them out aren’t consistently aligned or accountable.

And when change is required, employees may take new directives personally rather than understanding that adapting to change is part of maintaining a healthy, growing company.

By the time business owners hire me, they really need support. They know they’re dropping balls. Things are falling through the cracks, projects are taking longer than they should, they’re answering the same questions over and over, making decisions that should have already been made, and carrying way too much of a mental load. They know they need to change how the business operates, but they don’t know what the root issue is.

So when we start working together, I ask both them and their teams many whys to get to the root of the problems that they’re experiencing:

Why are you doing this process?
Why does it work?
Why doesn’t it work?
Why haven’t you tried something different?

But often, teams receive my questions as pressure and personal criticism. Instead of seeing the questions as an opportunity to examine how the business operates, they can feel like they’re being asked to defend why they’ve been doing their jobs the way they have.

I remember working with a founder who gave me the authority to work with their team to uncover the root of the underlying issues that kept surfacing. However, the moment I started asking the whys, team members began stonewalling. They stopped being transparent by withholding information and questioning why I was asking so many questions, and pushed back on the need for the new direction. Some even told me they didn’t understand the need for the new direction.

Despite my explanations about what was happening beneath the surface, they took everything personally. They believed that by automating their work, they would be out of work to do.

Both the resistance and the team’s thinking genuinely shocked me because my work was meant to help them, not replace them. Part of our work together would be to take repetitive, manual tasks off their plates so they could spend less time managing the day-to-day and more time developing their skills, taking on greater responsibility, and growing in their roles.

But the more I observed, the more I understood why the team was responding this way.

They were simply responding to a pattern the organization had reinforced for years. The team had always been reactive, held too many competing priorities, and was under-resourced. They had never developed the capacity to operate differently.

And I learned that that’s what organizationally young companies do. They respond to change from the structures and behaviors they already know because they haven’t yet built the systems, accountability, and capacity required to operate differently. And instead of developing new behaviors that’ll support the business in the way that’s required, they hold onto what is most comfortable for them: the business that already existed.

Most business owners believe their companies are more mature than they are. They believe that because they’ve gotten the initial buy-in, meaning they’ve communicated the changes required and the team says they’ll support them, the organization is ready for change.

So they expect a strategist to embed themselves within the company, build the strategy, redesign the processes, and tell them what’s going to happen next.

The problem with this assumption is that readiness is also needed.

The team must also be willing to come to the table, share what they know, be honest about what isn’t working, answer difficult questions, examine their own behaviors, and engage with the changes that will be required of them.

It’s not just saying, “Yes, we’re on board.” It’s being prepared to do the work that makes change possible.

And that’s where a strategist can help. They can identify where the organization is getting stuck, help you understand what’s creating resistance, clarify what needs to change, and help the team understand what their role will be in the new way of working. And that layer of work is absolutely necessary before a strategist can create the structure and roadmap.

So the next time you plan to outsource your support, ask yourself whether your business is actually ready to integrate the change you’re asking for.

Does your team have the capacity to participate?

Do they understand why the change is necessary?

Have they been given enough context and ownership to engage with it?

And are you prepared to change your own behavior, too?

Because you can outsource the work of designing change. You can’t outsource the responsibility to help your business reach the next level.

If your business is growing but the way you operate hasn’t grown with it, it may be time to look at what’s happening beneath the surface. I help business owners identify the organizational patterns, processes, and capacity issues that are keeping their businesses from moving forward, so they can build the structure needed for sustainable growth.

Ready to understand what’s really getting in the way? Let’s talk.