Corporate Growing Pains are a natural part of corporate life, but recognising and dealing with them can be difficult, and there is no single answer that will ever address them. As organisations grow, it becomes harder to focus on delighting your clients, customers, staff, shareholders, suppliers and all the others you have to deal with, as more focus is directed to organising the complexity that has been created by more people and more work.

This complexity keeps growing, and business leaders have less time to do the things they are passionate about and that drove them to create or join the organisation in the first place.

It is very hard for those involved in the day to day activity of an organisation to recognise that this is happening. It's like putting on weight, it generally happens incrementally and in ways that you don't notice until the extra weight is already there.

At this point, we often go searching for the miraculous cure, the crash diet, the exhaustive exercise regime or the invasive surgery that can fix our problems now. But our experience tells us that these individual solutions rarely provide sustainable success for us as individuals, and we often suffer relapses. How we treat weight gain is dependent on lifestyle, tastes, physical attributes, injuries, and personal motivations, among other things.

In the corporate world, the cures are often very invasive and demoralising, having a negative impact on performance. You have probably been through them, the removal of the boss, the extreme cost cutting program, redundancies and the major change management program.

Generally when organisations have reached these extremes, it is because they are acting when they believe it is too late to turn the situation around any other way. Confidence has already been lost, customer satisfaction is suffering, profits are down and employees are demoralised.

The good news is that it is rarely too late to turn the situation around. Very often corporations diagnose their problems as poor performance (the result) when in fact the diagnosis should be Corporate Growing Pains (the cause).

Having misdiagnosed poor performance, they then institute a cure - the answer that they believe will do the trick, with an emphasis on changing the leader, reducing costs, reducing staff or changing the product or the culture.

They look for the simple answer, the immediate way to achieve improved performance. But it rarely works quickly and almost inevitably causes much pain to your people.

I went through this in the last few years when my organisation brought in business coaches to assist with improving performance. The solutions the business coaches were asked to implement were excellent and often result in very efficient organisations. But there was a problem - the solutions did not suit the styles and skills of the current leader or many of the senior management team, nor did they suit the type of leaders who were progressing through the organisation given the nature of the business.

The solutions provided a business model that didn't fit the individual organisation, quick solutions that did not provide sustainable success for this business, and so the business suffered relapses and many people experienced greater pain.

Do you remember when you were growing up and going through your own growing pains? Do you remember how annoyed we all got at the platitudes and cliches that were offered as solutions - how we were frustrated because the people offering these solutions didn't understand us as individuals, and kept telling us we were just going through what everyone our age goes through?

Yes, many organisations go through Corporate Growing Pains, and many of the causes are similar, but the values, visions, goals and experiences are as different from organisation to organisation as the growing pains that each of us experienced in our personal lives. The solutions must be as individual as the organisations themselves.

Growing pains in our personal lives are often very useful. The help we got from our family, friends, heroes, mentors and others assisted us to define our values, our visions, our aspirations. They reminded us of the things we share with those important to us and why we share them.

Corporate Growing Pains can also be a valuable experience, if you recognise them and get the help you need to get through them. But there is no single right answer. The solution will vary from organisation to organisation, because the things we share, the things that are important vary from organisation to organisation.

The end result of resolving Corporate Growing Pains is recreating organisational alignment, but the ways to get there are many and varied, and dependent upon the people who make up the organisation, the shared values, visions and goals they have, the environment in which they operate and the capabilities they bring. We describe our approach as removing the passion bleeders and success barriers from your organisation, but we can't help you identify what they are and how to remove them until we know about your organisation.

This is why, whether in a presentation, workshop, publication or consultation, you will never hear Michelle and I offer a one right answer to Corporate Growing Pains.