Yesterday was unexpectedly great because I had an unexpectedly great meeting.  Every Monday, our management team meets, always with a pre-planned agenda.  This particular meeting was to be a review of financial reports and I was notified 20 minutes before the meeting that the reports were not ready.  Thus, the agenda was essentially empty.  I scrambled for content, landing on three blog articles I had saved in my Feedly stream.  I printed copies for the team and walked into the meeting expecting to phone this one in, have some banal discussion and go about our Monday.

One article was about process maturity, one about not having a need for capital as a negative growth sign and a third about using capital in start ups as an offensive strategy.  I was hoping the team would reflect on the maturity or relative immaturity of many of our processes and see how we have viewed capital expenditures as bottom line enhancers, not as offensive revenue growth strategies.  Both slightly different perspective.  You know, good mind expanding stuff.

This is when the meeting was unexpectedly great!  The team jumped right into the middle of this content, applying these concepts to engineering and sales and production.  They looked comprehensively at the business and then pushed forward stating that we have still been to pensive with resources.  They were ready to take more risk, be more proactive and offensive with growth strategies.  This is from a business that has traditionally been very conservative and only took risk when we knew it would work and we could easily afford it without upsetting any apple carts.  I was surprised and thrilled.  I clearly received the message that our risk tolerance has gone up as has our collective passion for growth.  What fun to walk in expecting a dud and get dynamite.

What is the moral of this story?  Why share this content?

I don’t really know yet, but I have some ideas:

1. Throw out great content to a great team and see what happens.
2. Never waste an opportunity with your team to have meaningful discussions.
3. Ask your team every once in a while what they think of the pace of growth: too fast, too slow, just right?
4. Good teams will push and challenge you as a leader.
5. Defensive strategies can sometimes lead to stagnation.
6. If you are going to profess a growth strategy, you better be ready to back it up with the investment finances.