Are you ready to grow (pt 3)?

You have a good product, you are aware of your own strengths and weaknesses. The final thing you need to check is your team is fully behind the project.

 Entering a new market costs money. There is often a debate within the company (particularly if your market is large e.g. the US or Germany) about whether the investment would be better spent trying to grow in your existing market. There needs to be agreement among the leadership team that entering a new market is the next stage of growth. It is a shortcut to failure if this expansion is seen as the CEO or CSO’s personal project.

 New market entry is a challenge and will need the whole company to be aligned to the success of the venture. Many senior leaders know this instinctively and so focus on organizational alignment to the venture. There are, however, two pre-requisites to successful alignment that need to be worked on to achieve alignment.

 The first is communication. This is the core of a team. When you communicate well, the team thrives. Good communication makes good relationships possible and good relationships are the second pre-requisite for alignment. What defines a good relationship? Trust. If there are good relationships there will be trust. Trust leads to openness in sharing information and engagement in the task. Communication and relationship leads to alignment on the what, when and, why of the task. Once you have that your team can start to align on vision, strategy and, tactic. If you have this, it is easier to execute and with good alignment and execution there are fewer mis-steps so capacity is raised.

If you achieve this, you create a virtuous circle of continuous improvement in team performance.

This is illustrated in the following graphic from Giant:

A video with a more extensive explanation can be found here: Maximizing Team Performance. Registration required.