Managing people in your growing SME

With over 20 years of experience and 1,000+ meetings delivered since our founding in 2004, MD2MD brings SME business leaders from a variety of sectors together for impactful peer-to-peer connection and collaboration. We invite SME business leaders to join us for an opportunity to share diverse perspectives, encourage fresh thinking and grow through open conversations.

As your business grows, it morphs and changes. It changes in how you need to manage it. It changes in how it is structured. It changes in its needs.

As the business grows, you need bigger, better, more structured systems for managing data, for paying people, for production, and for security, for example.

But how many business owners actually consider that you also need enhanced structures for managing people? That seems something that many founder / owners think is just something that you can do instinctively and by ‘feel’. You use your ‘parental’ skills, or your ‘friendship’ skills, or your – generally great – social skills to manage the people you start the business with.

This workshop is designed to give you practical experience of designing people’s jobs in a live interactive process. This leaves people, not only with a carefully honed list of responsibilities and tasks on paper or on the HR system, but one which they can hold in their heads and use as a practical everyday tool to guide their prioritisation and productivity.

In this practical session, you’ll experience the shift in clarity and accountability that happens when you revisit the design of your own role. You’ll work together with partners and in table groups to recreate the role you currently hold in your business – that of Managing Director. And you’ll experience the essential value of working with others, first to broaden your perspective, and then to tighten and refine your definitions of the precise deliverables of your role – as it needs to be in the future.

You will also hear and support other members in the same task, seeing how the MD role changes as businesses grow and change over time, and understanding how each set of accountabilities, while covering essentially the same functional areas, has to change in its scope and measurement as the business becomes more complex.

• The growth stages of organisations: where is yours right now?
• Clarifying people’s roles – beyond the ‘job description’.
• Practical experience of the role reset process using your own role as the ‘exercise’.
• How to ‘cascade’ the process to other areas of your organisation.
• Pitfalls to avoid.

By the end of the programme, you will be able to:

• Map where your organisation is on its growth path.
• Identify what this means for you as its leader.
• Clarify what your own priorities need to be at this stage.
• Introduce greater role clarity as the organisation grows.
• Create the foundations of an effective and appropriate operating infrastructure for managing people and their performance…
• …using an effective process which cascades accountability down through your organisation.

Host or Publisher Claire Ebbs - MD2MD