Scaling 201- Structural Audit: Is your Elephant clear?
Credit for the concept goes to Molly Graham articulated in this absolutely fantastic podcast. I’d strongly recommend taking time to go through the whol talk.
Its usually the simple/seemingly obvious things that tend to trip you up and once that happens we refuse to accept it and look for complicated reasons to explain the gap. But as Molly Graham asserts, clear roles and expectations are a manager’s only non-negotiable goals; without them, high performance is statistically impossible. Structural clarity is the primary lever for management efficiency.
The Listening Tour Diagnostic
To audit your structure right away, you don’t have to design a big survey, get it reviewed / approved, etc, just conduct a “Listening Tour” asking anyone in your team/org two surgical questions:
- “What is your job?”
- “What specific number were you hired to drive?”
Like I said, it sounds very simple and one would assume that everyone knows the answer, but you’d be surprised (and not pleasantly at that). While the “number” might be clear for Sales/Marketing teams (simply because of how company goals and compensation structures are set), you can dig deeper and ask for the lead measures / key activities they need to do to achieve it.
If the answers do not align with your own, you have a visualization failure. This is the “Elephant vs. Tiger” problem: the leader describes an elephant (the vision), but the team member visualizes and executes a tiger.
Re-describing the Elephant
Leaders must embrace the role of a “broken record.” Because the ground moves so quickly in a scaling company, you must redescribe the goal and the role at least 45 times (yes, it is statistically proven) before it is truly internalized. If you haven’t said it until you are sick of hearing yourself, the team hasn’t heard it yet. This is not an instance where less is more.
