If you’re doing it right, at some point your business grows. More customers, more employees, more stuff that needs to get done. When there’s some abrupt change that people can point at and say, “Well, this is the point where it is clear that we have to change",” it’s obvious that you’ve arrived to what’s called an inflection point.

An inflection point is a point in time where you reflect on what got you here and predict what you need to do to get to your next inflection point. When there’s an abrupt change, it’s clear that you need to change something or else your business and team are going to encounter substantial pain. We don’t like pain. They don’t like pain.

However, when change comes incrementally it can be hard to identify that you’re at an inflection point. Most people can’t wake up and deeply question every choice and system and fairly assess with clear eyes that this, right now, is the moment that change needs to happen. Mild inefficiencies and busywork are small problems, likely to be overshadowed by a much more urgent and important problem.

This is how tech debt builds up. This is why employee retention starts to falter. This is what experienced leaders try to nip in the bud before it moves from the Important-Not Urgent box to Important-Urgent box.

This is also called the Eisenhower Matrix.

Signs that you’re getting to an inflection point:

You start to feel stress over stuff that wasn’t a problem before
High performers are getting bored
Hearing the line “I wasn’t hired to do X”
The busywork is becoming oppressive, outpacing other responsibilities

As these signs start to accumulate, researching the causes behind them and deciding if these are chronic or temporary becomes a growing responsibility, often left to a manager or leader (though not always: some proactive teams address inflection points organically). If you are that leader or team member, there are some mindset shifts that need to happen before and during an impending inflection point.

First mindset shift: Stop working in the business; start working on the business

Work on the business, not in the business

This is a tired cliche and many other people have written on this mindset shift and how to approach it. However, not many people write about when you need to run through all these excellent recommendations. Knowing that you are at an inflection point, especially an incremental one, requires observation, reflection, and a curiosity fueled by high expectations.

For those of you looking for a more prescriptive answer, consider the following:

What takes up the most time, either for you or your colleagues? Why does it take the most time? Hypothetically, what would happen if it took less time? What would it take to get there?
What’s a dumb task, responsibility, process, or activity that you or your team has to do? Why is it dumb? Is there a great reason they have to do it? Is it a relic of the past? Is it possible that a tool, system, or workflow would minimize or eliminate it?
With the two bullet points above, is the cost of change higher than the time you spend over six months on the time suck/dumb task? How about one year? Five years? Where’s the break-even point in time?
Can we break anything in half and hire someone to do the basic stuff and leave the advanced stuff to existing staff? Am I emotionally ok with ceding some control?

Ask yourself and your team these questions quarterly. What’s great about repeating this quarterly is that as your business and team grows and changes, the answers should evolve. If your answers evolve, then what you did the previous quarter is having some impact. If they don’t, then you have a track record of your biggest pain points and opportunities to improve. Perhaps it’s a sign that change isn’t happening where it should.

Second mindset shift: Procedures matter more than personality

There’s a time in a growing business’s lifetime when the whole company cannot meet at the same time around the same conference room table. When that event happens, it’s a harbinger that culture will change and consistency will be harder to achieve. The biggest way to proactively address this is to codify what your team is doing exceedingly well and replicate it while identifying the lessons learned from everyone’s mistakes and strategically avoiding them.

When the team is bigger than a conference room, change is coming

This inflection point requires you to zoom out and observe your team in action as a third-party, rather than an insider. You will probably be surprised by what’s happening: people close to the work can quickly iterate and optimize their daily operations, so three different employees may have three different ways of doing the same task. As the leader, taking the best parts from the team and writing them down is an important procedural task to set up your yet-to-be-hired employees with a how-to guide.

During this process, your current people will be asked to change. How they’ve done things is going to be tweaked to serve the greater good of the organization. Approaching this like a change management exercise is critical to keeping your experienced talent: recognize the work that got the team to this inflection point, overcommunicate the change and vision for the future, and provide relevant and timely training and support to adopt both the new skill/process as well as the emotional mindset of scaling for the future.

This is often helped by working with a third-party like Learn to Scale. Not only would an outside expert help smooth the process, but it helps defray the emotional resistance to change and defuse the rumors of change being personally/politically motivated.

Third mindset shift: Preparing the middle management level

This inflection point is when you find yourself moving from a three month horizon to a three year horizon. At some point, starting long-term strategic initiatives today begins to seep into your day-to-day tactical decisions.

For example, it may be critical to hire more sales account representatives to hit a revenue milestone in the next few months. However, looking three years out, you would have to grow a sales team threefold based on their current sales averages and would have to get a much larger space to handle the headcount. Considering that would be a much higher overhead cost, perhaps a better three year strategy is to optimize your sales operations and minimize new hires. Today, you might decide to add a sales operations hire to the three month hiring plan to start building the infrastructure for an optimized team for the three year vision.

Managing the long-term risk and making strategic decisions more means someone needs to sweat the day-to-day

That’s a three-year strategic play made in concert with the three month tactical needs. As you transition more and more towards the three-year horizon in your decisions, it’s a sign that tactical decision-making is moving down the chain of command to your managers. Or, if you don’t have middle managers, congratulations on learning that you need a new management layer. Someone needs to decide how to execute the next few months while you’re busy thinking of three year plans.

Preparing middle management before they struggle with new decision-making responsibilities is rarely achieved when an organization is growing so fast. One day a bright young thing is doing exceptionally well as an individual contributor, the next day they are offered a pay raise and a manager title they can’t say no to, and then three months later retention starts to falter. People aren’t leaving the organization at this point, they are leaving their manager who is ill-equipped for their new role.

This fast-growing organization that doesn’t have a robust learning and development team on staff is what drove us to found Learn to Scale. The growing pains that so many small organizations face can be defrayed by bringing in an expert who can coach and provide structure for the middle management tier to flourish. This upfront investment is paid many times over when critical employees choose to stay with their great manager, rather than leave when their manager can’t seem to transition successfully to management responsibilities.

Want to learn more about mindset shifts, inflection points, and ways to keep retention high? Schedule a chat with us to see if there’s something we can do for you.