I have been preaching a message that we need to be prepared to hire ahead of growth.  The only way we avoid a drop off in growth rate is to have the capacity we need for the next level already in place before the growth actually happens.  Then guess what happened the first time I made a move to hire ahead of growth?  I woke up the next morning almost in a panic, thinking: “What if this doesn’t work?  Oh, I better make it work!”

Our pattern has been to hire behind the growth.  Sometimes way behind it.  Having been very conservative with our finances and our new positions, we tended to wait until we could absolutely afford the salary and have well more than 40 hours of work before we hired someone.  The belief was that if the new person had downtime, it was bad.  How dare we have a person in the organization that was not fully utilized or even maxed out before they start?

My current belief is that staffing an organization for growth will pull it to the next level.  That should be way easier than trying to push it to the next level with a staff appropriate for the current level.

Now it is time to test that theory.  Granted not all the hires on the list to be staffed at the next level are in place, only the first of several, but we will see if my belief holds true.  I actually like calling it a belief because as I am discovering there is definitely an element of faith involved in hiring ahead of growth.  There is no certainty it will work, only the faith that it will.  It also takes faith to step out of your comfort zone and that is definitely where I am today, and we are as an organization with our first proactive growth hire.