Articles and thoughts

Upscaling, what is it really? Very straight forward its about increasing numbers, doing things bigger, with bigger results, going from a team of 30 to a company of 300, with more clients, a higher turnover, increased profit.

When upscaling, a strategic people roadmap is crucial to ensure that the organisation has the right #talent, culture, and capabilities to support its growth objectives. The Roadmap ensures all key areas evolve in unison to support overall growth. Unbalanced growth, uneven growth in one area at the expense of another area, will not result in achieving the overall growth objectives. It will turn upscaling into an inefficient and costly operation.

It is a common problem that while you are in the middle of a #hiring drive, the individual performance of your employees will suffer. To avoid this, you sometimes need the courage to put on the brakes (temporarily) and ensure that the infrastructure, your processes, culture, and resources don’t evolve disproportionately from one another with the risk of being completely out of balance from one another.

Upscaling is about multiplying, not about additions. It’s about achieving more with less. It is about one leader growing multiple leaders, multiplying impact, skills, capacity, output, results.

Upscaling and agility. A delicate relationship. As a #startup the organisation was extremely agile, it is what made it successful. Now the organisation is upscaling. Is it going to lose its magic trait? As the push for infrastructure, processes and policies increases, is the organisation going to lose its agility?

A start-up or a scale-up are very different. In a start-up you have a blank canvas to design all the policies, processes, culture, infrastructure. For a start-up it is essential to put the “wheels on the bus”, for HR this means ensuring people actually have proper contracts, that there is a handbook, #onboarding, a #performancemanagement process and other basic policies. It’s a great opportunity to implement HR ideals that fit for the organisation.

When moving from the #startup to the #scaleup phase there is a high risk of creating pressure points. I have often observed key employees who played a pivotal role in the success of the start-up, getting burned-up when scaling-up.

A #startup business will run after every potential prospect and grab every opportunity. A #scaleup is inclined to do the same, when it shouldn't. To be successful a scale-up needs to make difficult decisions and have the courage, wisdom, and clarity to know when to say "NO".

For me, #criticalthinking is the number one skill for everybody involved in upscaling. Absolutely 100%. Ask me why, and I probably won’t stop talking for a long time. Today I will try to be short and give you my 2 cents on why critical thinking is particularly important for organisations who are upscaling.

Upscaling is about a journey. Vision is a destination. Strategy is the roadmap.

Growing without #criticalthinking is not possible. Whether at individual level or organisational level, critical thinking is essential to advance, grow, develop, innovate, learn.

Criticizing versus being critical. A big and important distinction. Unfortunately, sometimes people criticize rather than being critical. Criticizing is deconstructive, being critical is constructive.