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Growing Pains: Surviving Your Expanding Team or Organization
When you’re a kid, growing pains can make you cranky, confused, and even a little bit irritational. When you’re a fully grown adult, company and team growing pains can have the same effect. Letting them get the better of you could have repercussions for your career and your work relationships.
When they start screaming (or whispering) at you, listen to logic instead.
What the growing pains say about the responsibility management wants you to share:
Listen to logic: Give away your Legos.
During a talk for Slack, rapid-growth veteran Molly Graham uses a Lego metaphor to characterize the territorial “dibsing” that happens in play spaces, classrooms, and also companies.
You’ve been playing with a certain set of bricks (your tasks and responsibilities) for so long, you might be reluctant to let someone else have a go. But letting others play with your Legos frees you up to try building new things and enables your entire company to build more, and better, things.
What the growing pains say about all your new coworkers:
Listen to logic: Set aside your fear and insecurity in favor of empathy.
All your new co-workers are not threats or enemies. You’re all on the same team after all. The desire to establish hierarchies and boundaries drives some people to avoid or withhold knowledge from their new teammates. That leads to absolutely nothing positive.
Instead, do as the Trello blog recommends and seek opportunities for cross-functional collaboration. You can start small by asking your new coworkers to help you in small ways, such as gathering images for a presentation or proofreading a report.
What the growing pains say about your original plan.
Listen to logic: Embrace the need to adapt.
As the business experts at the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal write, “As your business grows, your strategy needs to evolve to suit your changed circumstances.”
Even the principles of biological evolution attest to the virtues of modifications over time.
How do you actually alter your vision to accommodate your growing team or company? You start with the facts.
The Sage Group recommends “gathering and analyzing business intelligence” as a strategic way to understand the multi-faceted and constantly shifting complexities of your growing business.
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Employees want training. A Pew Research survey found that 87% of workers feel it’s essential for keeping up with market changes. An Axonify survey found that 92% of employees experienced increased engagement when they had well-planned training programs.
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We’ve compared monday.com to the Swiss army knife of project management softwares — and they’ve taken it up a notch by launching industry specific templates.
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- HR Requests
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Turnkey agenda templates for your next meeting
Your meeting is only as good as your agenda, and your agenda is only as good as your agenda template.
We’ll admit this isn’t a universally applicable admonimition, but for most meetings, an agenda could change outcomes from “waste of time” to “miraculously productive.”
Here are some agenda templates you might want to swipe or bookmark:
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