Do you know WHY you want to Grow?

This sounds like a stupid question.  Do you need a particular reason to grow? Do you even have a choice?  On the surface the cry of opposition is loud and seemingly logical. However none of this can drown the importance of this question.

Let us assume you are an artiste and this question was asked to you. ‘Why do YOU want to Grow?’ – your answer maybe ‘So that I can play better music, paint better or sculpt better’.  Then the effort that you will take to grow; will have to be in taking in inputs that will help you to play better music, paint better pictures and sculpt better.

However let us say you ask this to a manager of the music company, in all probability he will tell you the reason for him wanting to grow is to capture 20% of market share in Tamil Pop Music. Then the actions he has to do would be entirely different and not necessarily in the lines of making his singers sing better.

An artiste who says she wants to capture 20% of market share of listeners and a business man who says he wants to enable his singers realize their singing potential – are in all likeliness going to be working with highly conflicting and contradictory forces internally.

Similarly if a social organization is going to work on any aspect other than impact as its growth motivator and a commercially inclined organization forgets to put profit and value to its shareholder as its motivator for growth – their growth journey is going to be one of internal turmoil (despite external success)

Many times we do not spend time to define the’ WHY’ of our wanting to grow. We don’t know whether we want to grow to become best product creators, we want to grow to make profits or we want to grow for becoming the best place to work etc. When you and your team are not sure of WHY you want to grow – every time you take a step someone is going to raise a question on whether it is the right step. This will slow you down and eventually get you to a stop.

So to continue to grow, you need to have a strong WHY first!