Leaders Achieve Business Growth through Staff Development

ClearShark, based in Hanover, was named to the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies for the third year in a row. Inc. cited the impressive 145 percent growth over a three year period for ClearShark’s inclusion on the list. Many business owners and executives envy that level of growth but rarely appreciate the staff development necessary to achieve it.

Giving sales-related tasks their due diligence is part of growing your business. As business growth occurs, you have to divide your time amongst more tasks, more clients, and more team members. As your time gets divided among more people and more duties, focus and efficiency on staff development becomes paramount to maintain consistent growth.

The busier you get, the easier it is to fall into the trap of ‘busy work,’ or tasks that make you feel like you're accomplishing things but actually detract from business success. It's imperative that leaders don't use "I don't have time" as an excuse for slow or stagnant growth. While it's true that there is only so much time in  a day, effective leaders prioritize development activities  and delegate or downgrade the activities that won't directly lead to growth. As CEO Martin Bentz alluded in his comment, a leader’s number one asset is their people. Too often this asset is left to waste with no focused development that will lead to business growth.

If your goal is to grow in a similar rate as ClearShark, investing half your time in developing people is often the best way to consistently grow your business. There are four primary development tasks with staff that can exponentially grow the business:

1. Supervising – Supervising is code for “accountability.” Even veteran teams need guidance to meet expectations. Otherwise staff can default to what they like to do rather than what they need to do to meet growth targets.
2. Coaching – Coaching is helping your direct reports become more effective in their current roles. That instruction should cascade down throughout the organization but obviously customized to individual roles.
3. Mentoring – While coaching helps employees succeed in their current roles, mentoring helps prepare employees for future roles in your organization. Nothing halts business growth like a workforce unprepared to take on the next challenge. To effectively mentor your team, each member must have a personalized development plan.
4. Training – Training means giving your employee the tools to become self-sufficient in their role. It should provide skills development as well as structure for meeting stated goals. In this way your staff has both the technical and conceptual resources to consistently grow themselves and the business.

These development tasks provide tangible encouragement to staff which challenges them to be more than they currently are in their role. This challenge repeated throughout the business collectively raises the bar and organically establishes rapid growth.