Big Changes Mean Tough Organizational Decisions

When you bring in a business consultant, they should be a rented business partner scanning the entire enterprise. In other words, be prepared to fire people and shake things up if need be as you make use of their input.

Or you are wasting your effort.

Half of my clients fire someone as (mostly right after) they work with me. Not because I point fingers. Not my style. Because they realize they now need to optimize their team for exponential growth.

Companies change, and not everyone remains a good fit (or wants to learn).

The easy ‘removals’ are the BigCo classically trained folks unwilling to unlearn habits from earlier in their resume. The sunk cost of all that career time often prevents change.

It’s harder if it’s a decent worker or a nice person who just struggles to get to the next level of sophistication that you need. In most cases, the literature I’ve reviewed would suggest that finding someone, anyone internally to promote and support to fill your functional need is the best thing for a startup that is NOT making a massive pivot. 

It’s when the pivot needs to happen that internal BS between the old guard and the new folks erupts. This may necessitate a clean sweep of leadership or replacing individuals in the primary roles. It’s a case-by-case situation.  Third-party evaluations by consultants and Boards are significant triggers of these kinds of changes in fast-growing companies. As they sometimes need to be. Significant changes rarely come without big executional changes. The latter, not the new strategy, is often where employees get hung up, cling to the past, or refuse to change.