Organizational Development

Greetings Medium readers! This is my first post here, so I will be glad to receive any feedback! Thank you.

I wrote about the organizational development and process. First of all, let’s google it.

Organizational development is a planned effort for a work group and/or the organization, managed by leadership and supported by employees, to increase organization effectiveness through planned change in processes and systems

The reason I decided to talk about this, is simple. Many startups after they had the success, become a company and start constantly grow. A company needs a system, structure, and organizational efforts.

And a company management format differs from startup management. In many cases, founders try to keep the old structure, but that is not possible.
When you just started your path, with big dreams, and hopes — your team follows you and your dreams. After becoming an organization, your team grows, your teammates become your employees. Maybe it is sad, but that is the reality, and you as an entrepreneur, founder, leader, CEO, need to accept this. Although there is always another way.

Just imagine that the company is an alien organism, that grows and develops itself, and you are the one who is responsible for the whole growing process. On the other hand, you are also responsible for the company survivals (finance, customers, business partners, etc. ).

How to handle all these responsibilities? The solution is simple, you start hiring people and delegating tasks. Although we won’t talk about hiring, we will talk about hired people development.

The first thing in organizations is different than in the startups is bureaucracy. This is a very dangerous routine — that’s the monster that transforms teammates to employees and employees to numbers on documents. You hire staff, to start developing organizational culture, processes and other stuff based on information that is on paper. This is the main way companies work and grow, and this is straightway to have employees who hate their job and organization. One morning you just realize that you created a big company, where no one from your employees wants to work. And you start to hire new people and the circle of routine starts from zero.

Some CEO’s just ignore this, some create a retinue, and focus on it, forgetting about others. But usually, that doesn’t work out, good employees start to leave the organization, and you left with not competent specialists and newcomers.

So how to escape this situation? It’s actually not very easy, although possible. You need to develop your employees - make them grow, change departments, inspire them to invent new things, use their potential with maximal effect. Don’t push them, but inspire to do more, let them work without limitations. If someone failed a task, that is bad, but if someone accomplished more than expected, you must give much more attention to that, never, never ignore those people. Those people are diamonds in your company. Without your attention — they are just a coal, but with a little development, they can bring you a fortune.

Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things.

When people say “Organizational Development”, we imagine business processes, documents, structural pictures, charts and so on. Yes, that is important and very helpful, especially if you have a big company, but the most important thing in “Organizational Development”, and in the company — are people. Your company is your employees, and if you want to develop and grow your company, you need to start with your people.