Rachel Nutt, a senior partner at MHA, is all too familiar with the leadership challenges presented by growth. In addition to her experience of advising some of the country’s leading entrepreneurs, she has also witnessed first hand some of the internal challenges to rapid growth of her firm.

“When we got to about £50/60m we assumed that people would do things in a certain way, but we’ve been growing so fast that random behaviours were creeping in,” she explains. Recruiting fast from other big firms meant there was some fantastic talent coming in, but the culture of the firm was starting to morph away from its original values.

“People didn’t really like what had been created and they weren’t happy. Things that we thought never needed to be said suddenly did. Despite a healthy balance sheet and great results against classic KPIs, the firm recognised that the cultural malaise would have longer-term ramifications and could act as a blocker to growth.

“We had our star values that we all liked. But unless you embed them in how leaders work and how you judge performance at the top, they don’t filter through,” Nutt says. In practice, that meant rewarding performance in the broadest sense, not just in terms of financial success, but using a balanced scorecard that took a whole host of metrics into consideration. On the back of that process, Nutt has come up with her key rules for gauging leadership success. 

From talk to delivery 

You may have a list of core values, but are you really delivering them? You can’t just talk it, you also have to bed it in across the business. Broadening the criteria of success requires a different mindset, so you have to communicate what good looks like and deal with any deviations from the standard, Nutt says. 

“For example, a partner might bring in lots of work, but they can’t operate like a sole trader. It’s tough to have a conversation like that with someone who may have been a partner for many years.” While focusing on the firm’s core values was a reset moment, it also presented the firm’s leadership with some tough decisions. “There were some awkward conversations, but it has driven the business to the culture it has today, because it starts to trickle down,” Nutt explains. 

“Some people became converts because once they saw it, they enjoyed life more because they weren’t just working to hit KPIs. Don’t get me wrong, we still have KPIs, but it’s about looking at what you’ve done for the greater good, what you’ve done for that sense of team,” she says. “There were some who didn’t engage. And the reality is, they got left behind.” 

Put goals into context

Having conviction in your ambition isn’t enough in itself. It’s important to contextualise your growth targets to people and to make it real, to avoid them becoming the noise in your ear that detracts from you achieving your goals. “We’re now a £200m business but if, when we were a £50m business and we’d said we could get to £200m, there are people who wouldn’t have backed that bus.”

“If you can get people to put that into context of what they’ve achieved to date and where they’re going to go next, you can often get more people to buy into it. But you can’t just put the number out there because people have big perceptions over how achievable they are.”

Admit failure and mistakes 

Historically, leadership styles have shied away from admitting to the negatives. And yet, to have a truly entrepreneurial business, you need people to be human – and that includes admitting to failure and mistakes. “You need to share the things that go wrong, because otherwise people will never be entrepreneurial or take chances, because you never would have empowered them to do it in the first place,” Nutt says.

Preserving an entrepreneurial spirit requires people to take risks in a controlled way, Nutt says. “You can’t have a successful business with an aggressive growth strategy without properly calculated risk and people won’t do it if they think no one else has ever got it wrong before. Accepting that things haven’t worked out, or that you’ve made mistakes, is a superpower, not a sign of weakness.”

One direction 

When you go through big change in a business on a big journey, there will always be people who take longer to get on that journey, and you need to accommodate that. But you also have to accept that there are some who should never be on the boat in the first place. “People will find that decision very hard indeed, but it’s much better to put them on a boat going in a different direction,” Nutt explains. 

“Most successful clients are good at recognising when something isn’t working despite their best efforts. If you’re not sharing that common goal, and they can’t see it, and they can’t get there, then you have to recognise that and do something about it, however high up they are in the organisation.” 

Embrace authenticity 

When it comes to leadership, there’s a lot to be said for being yourself rather than just ticking boxes on a job description, Nutt says. “What everyone really wants is for people to be individual. We certainly do in our organisation, because they all bring different aspects to the business rather than trying to emulate people who have gone before them.” After all, people are at their best if they’re more relaxed and more comfortable and being themselves.

“Among my entrepreneurial clients, the most successful ones are often the biggest characters who are determined and have ambition. Because I started out in a male-dominated world, I didn’t have any female role models to copy when I was working out how to be a partner, so I had to figure it out myself. I welcome that approach and the diversity it brings into the business.”