High-growth businesses need to rely on people that are invested in the company’s success. These individuals are encouraged to speak their minds in a proactive, structured manner; further, they are receptive to other team members’ opinions and are objectively aware of everyone’s contribution. When we look at employees as people, rather than mere resources in a project plan, we establish a culture of true teamwork that fuels sustainable growth.

This seems like common sense, but I’ve seen many high-potential businesses launch or turnaround with a strong and viable business strategy only to become hindered by a poor teamwork culture. In the absence of a leadership-nurtured teamwork culture, teams default to working within the bounds of processes – because at the very least, work is getting done and delivered on time.

Processes must be human.
Processes are absolutely critical to any high-growth enterprise. Without processes, everyone’s on a different page, there’s little alignment, haphazard integration, and shabby execution that shows up in the final product and the customer experience. But, process-driven work environments that over-emphasize deadlines and under-value human judgment cannot sustain productivity gains, employee attrition rates increase, and worst of all they lose valuable human perspective.

While it’s difficult to have “too much” process, you can certainly have an over-mechanized environment that strips the team’s humanity to the bare basics. A huge problem with this is that people stop acting like people. They ardently stay in their own swim lanes, and when the inevitable project hitch arises, they begrudgingly (read: passive aggressive) throw in a hand to pick up slack.

High-growth enterprises need entrepreneurial people.
Today’s forward-looking enterprises maintain rigorous talent acquisition practices that don’t just look for hard skills but also seek out individuals with high emotional intelligence and entrepreneurial drive. These are professionals that are ready to be inserted into process-driven organizations but expect to contribute to the big picture – they want a stake in the game and this is even more evident in the latest generation joining the workforce, millennials.

If you manage a team and observe a decline in empathetic, constructive feedback – take a step back and look for areas where micro-level processes can be removed and roles re-defined. Before doing this, you might take an initial step forward by defining a time and place where your staff can share project feedback and contribute ideas. If you’re not in a high-growth enterprise…maybe you’re fine either way – but we’re still a few years out from an all-robot workforce.

p.s. this is a good place to hat tip the growing trend of agile marketing. A software development methodology applied to marketing, a discipline that requires equal parts science and art, where frequent communication and constructive feedback is not only encouraged but required. Stay iterative, my friends.