One of the hardest things for a business to overcome is a plateau. If your company becomes stagnant, it can be difficult to break out of those patterns to find new opportunities for growth. Here are some strategies to creatively identify the issues holding your business back, helping you to overcome obstacles and create innovative strategies for the future.
Identify the Assumptions Holding Your Business Back
If it feels like something is holding your company back, it may be because your leadership team has been operating under the same false assumptions for too long. Making assumptions about your company’s circumstances is natural, and can help streamline the process of strategic planning. But sometimes, those assumptions are wrong and hold your business back. To get past that obstacle, your company’s decision makers need to:
- Question your business’s default responses
- Creatively identify alternatives to those responses
- Find objective ways measure the validity of each response
- Evaluate which response best fits your company’s goals and values
Often, this kind of reflection can be difficult because it asks business owners and leaders to be vulnerable to the possibility of being wrong, and to embrace the possibility of doing things differently.
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Change the Voices in the Room
One way to overcome that challenge is to change the people involved in the conversation. This is not to say you should give up your decision making authority. However, one way to creatively identify the issues holding you back is to listen to the people who have a stake in your company’s success:
- Your employees,
- Your investors, and
- Your clients.
Your employees may have a very different understanding about what is going on in your business than the leadership does. By inviting their feedback about the company’s processes and procedures, you can identify assumptions and roadblocks standing between your company and its better outcomes, be it growth, profitability, or productivity.
Similarly, your clients will be able to tell you where your company may be falling short in communication and performance. No one likes to hear bad things about their business, but if you take the time to be receptive to criticism, it can help you overcome the assumptions holding your business back.
5 Common Issues That Can Hold Your Business Back
The specific challenges facing your company will depend on the size of the company, your industry, and its stage of development. However, there are some common issues that can affect businesses in all their forms.
- Lack of Clarity of Purpose
If your company’s leadership cannot clearly explain what you are in business to do, it can hold you back from developing a clear plan to do it. One of the best ways to move past a plateau is to clarify your company’s purpose. By working with an organizational development specialist, you can better define your company’s values and identify your guiding star.
- Unrealistic Company Goals
Even if your purpose is clear, your leadership may be holding your business back if it has set out unrealistic goals for the company. This applies to both overly ambitious goals and uninspired benchmarks. If your goals are set too high, your staff may not be able to meet it and become discouraged or overworked. However, if the goals are too low it can hold your business back from reaching its full potential.
- Unclear Long-Term Strategies
Once the goals have been set, the next thing holding your company back may be the strategies you use to get there. This is where the company’s policies and procedures come into play. If you have unclear long-term strategies, your team members may not have clear direction on how to accomplish those goals. Clearly communicating the company’s long-term strategies will set the roadmap for your employees to rise to the occasion.
- Mismatched Personnel
Another common issue for businesses comes from who those team members are. Often, companies are resistant to hiring additional personnel. You may also have employees that are better suited to different roles. Working with a facilitator to identify personnel who are being underutilized or mis-assigned, as well as creating a goal-oriented hiring strategy, can help you make better use of your staff to achieve your company’s purpose.
- Missing Creative Communications Strategies
One frequently overlooked issue holding companies back is communication. Often, company leadership will spend substantial time and energy developing a strategic plan that is never communicated to the key stakeholders. Without creative communication strategies, and a commitment to transparency and honesty in the operation of your business, your company could stagnate even with the best strategic plan.
How to Creatively Overcome Stagnant Business Issues
If you are ready to break out of a stagnant business state, the best thing to do is work with an organizational development specialist. This expert can help you obtain the objectivity to test your company’s assumptions and develop the vision statements, goals, and strategies to take your business to the next level.
David Stanislaw is an organizational development specialist with over 25 years’ experience in helping leaders develop and implement creative leadership strategies. Through business consulting and facilitation, David helps businesses and teams improve productivity and team cohesion. Contact us to meet with David to make your creative business thrive today.
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