Scaling Organizations

The Wall Street Journal did a profile of Oatly. The company has been around for 25 years but has most recently attracted investors with a very high profile such as Oprah Winfred. The bottom line of the profile is that they were very creative in distributing their product to baristas to influence customers and create demand in the marketplace. It worked! Then Oatly ran out of product in 2018. It started building out production, had major issues and delays. And couldn't deliver consistently on it's contracts to major chains such as Starbucks. Oat Milk shortages happened again in 2021.

As a result a market was created and others jumped in. The real challenge here was that the organization wants to grow and the gear up for the challenge, but some parts do it faster than others. Maybe production does it faster than marketing- people are hired, product produced, but not enough of it is sold to sustain it for the long haul or the converse happens and Demand is created and operations can't keep up.

Either way the results is that you have unhappy customers because their needs aren't being met and the competitors swoop in to take over the market-share. Or a lot of money is spent on people and good that are just sitting around not being sold.

This mismatch is an indicator that focus is being placed on one part of the organization while not understating the downstream impacts of what is needed in the rest of the organization.

Often this happens because of gap in leadership. The leader may have come up through one part of the organization that is the strongest and doesn't clearly understand what is needed in the other parts of the organization to be effective. They are leading from a silo. They often times are not sharing the leadership amongst their leadership team.

You likely will not know it if you've never seen it. Having an outside perspective is one key way to close the gap. The key is to get the organization working in unison. This requires developing a shared leadership model at the executive level.

Do you have parts of your organization that slow down the rest? If so, is it time to take a look at the team you have in place? How willing and able are they to share leadership with one another? Do they have the competency to do so?

What is holding you back from getting started?