Reframing growth when the rules suddenly changed

A fast-growing, tightly regulated market leader needed to protect its ability to deliver when a major external change put its business model under pressure.

Imagine leading a business that has helped pioneer its field, is growing phenomenally quickly and is attracting some of the best international talent working across three continents. Then the rules under which you operate suddenly change.

Add the aftermath of Covid and significant external events creating further uncertainty for an internationally dispersed team. Any one of those things would have been a considerable challenge.

Together? I’d call that existential.

This wasn’t simply a question of keeping people happy. The business delivers tightly regulated contracts for a very significant client, so consistency really matters. Its ability to deliver depends on having exceptional specialist people, keeping them and continuing to grow their expertise. The changes taking place around the business put some of that in jeopardy.

At the same time, the business itself had grown up. What had worked when it was smaller wasn’t necessarily going to work now. Different teams could experience the culture differently, its vision and purpose no longer properly described the organisation it had become and its fairly conventional corporate values weren’t much help when people needed to make difficult decisions at pace.

Talking to people across the organisation and to external partners brought one question to the fore: why would the very best people in this field choose to build their careers here?

Finding the answer was commercially necessary. If the business wanted to keep delivering brilliantly for its client, it needed to keep and grow brilliant people. If it wanted to continue growing, it needed to attract more of them.

My recommendation was to stop making growth the story and create a new ambition: to become the natural home and launchpad for the world’s greatest talent in its field.

This would not have worked without total buy-in and, goodness me, they did.

The business invested in qualifications and sponsored degrees, with HP leading a career development strategy for every member of the team. It looked again at employment arrangements and removed restrictive provisions, setting out to become somewhere exceptional people could develop their careers.

We reframed the organisation’s purpose and created behavioural principles people could actually use when making decisions. The litmus test was whether the business could continue to deliver, to the standard its client expected, through a period of considerable change.

It did, while continuing to grow, retaining an excellent team and a formidable reputation.