In this episode of the Cherryleaf Podcast, Ginny Critcher talks with Ben French, leadership development consultant and business coach, about what it really takes to transition an organisation from founder-led to a more structured, process-driven way of working.
Drawing on their shared experience working with a global football organisation, Ben and Ginny explore the tension between preserving the culture that made a company successful and introducing the processes needed to help it grow — or survive contraction. They discuss when organisations typically need to make this shift, why getting the calibration of process right matters as much as having process at all, and how documenting culture and policy are really the same thing.
Topics covered include:
- Why organisations of around 10–30 people often hit a tipping point
- The challenge of adapting central frameworks to work across different countries and cultures
- How external consultants can help organisations ask the right questions — not just do the work
- The role of decision-making clarity in shaping culture
- How to communicate that policy is always a work in progress
Ben also shares what he’s been working on since, including a project with the British government focused on embedding new behaviours as different parts of the Foreign Office come together.
Find out more about Ben French at ben-french.com Visit Cherryleaf at cherryleaf.com
Transcript
Hi and welcome to the Cherryleaf podcast.
Today it’s me, Ginny Critcher.
I’m one of the directors and co-founders of Cherryleaf, speaking to Ben French.
I’ve got Ben French here with me.
Ben is a consultant and business coach specialising in leadership development, and today’s topic is, we’re going to be discussing how to make the change from founder-led to a process-driven organisation.
Welcome, Ben, and thank you so much for being here with us today.
Thank you very much as well.
It’s a pleasure to be here.
Ben, so that was a really brief little bio I gave there.
Would you like to flesh that out a bit more about what it is you actually do? I often wonder what I actually do, Ginny.
So the way I think about what I do is, I work with organisations who are trying to figure out how to create more space for individuals to step up into leadership throughout the organisation.
So my belief is that leadership is very much an activity that that anyone can do and that organisations are always much more successful when they are enabling people to identify problems, come up with solutions, and then drive the progress or the activity to make that change happen.
So for me, that’s the thing that really motivates me, and I’m super fascinated by how you do that and how we should have shipped the model really from a sort of top-down visionary CEO-type led model of leadership to an organisation-wide model of leadership that that enables multiple people to solve multiple problems all at the same time.
Hopefully, that makes sense.
That’s great.
Much more inclusive.
You know? It seems that a great way to work, isn’t it? And, so we’ve been working together on a project, haven’t we, Cherryleaf and you? And I was just trying to remember how that came about, actually.
How did we? No.
No.
It’s, we looked back through the emails because it was quite a long time ago, wasn’t it? It was back in, I don’t know, 2023, I think.
I think so.
So I think that came about because I had been doing some work for this organisation, and they were in the middle of a sort of, you know, big process of change, trying to take a group of, you know, clubs and academies.
It was a, it was a football organisation, from being somewhat fragmented and dispersed geographically to being a bit more organised in a, in a sensible group structure.
You know, as often with any startup, it was moving from that sort of founder-led to, you know, organisation-led mode and moving from people, that people doing delivering and taking action on, to a more structured, policy-led approach.
And so myself and the sort of CEO of that organisation were at this point where we’d sort of gone through a lot of the process, but we realised we actually didn’t have any of the process documented.
So we were looking for, I think, Cherryleaf, if I, if I recall, but we’re looking for an organisation that would help us do some of the technical writing and consolidate all of the different pieces of policy work and thinking across the organisation in a way that sort of brought different teams along in the process.
And we came across Cherryleaf, which, it was a pleasure.
It’s been, it was always really nice to work with you two.
We were delighted to work with you guys.
Absolutely.
And, also, it was an absolute treat for us to have somebody like you, kind of in the middle between the end client, as it were.
And then you were, that you were the bridge.
You kept everything rolling along and that was absolutely massively helpful.
And I guess we’re going to get into some of those topics about how you create momentum, how you get going with that, but I have to say for Cherryleaf it was, it was an absolute delight.
We’d really like to have you on lots of projects.
Just tell all your clients you need me! We’ve kind of set the scene a little bit about, do you want to tell us a little bit more about how they came to find you or what was the introduction to this organisation for you? So I’ve been doing some work through a company in, in Bath called Elite Performance Partners, and that, that’s they do recruitment.
And just through conversations, really, they come into this organisation helping on the recruitment side and actually then found themselves supporting on this, this project that sort of morphed over time from, you know, help us think about our leadership team to then help us think about our organisation to, okay.
Hold on.
We’re not quite sure we’ll quote what we want, but this is where we want to go and help us now turn that into a reality in terms of policies and processes and behaviours and ways of work, which is, which is obviously the thing that I’m perhaps the most interested in.
Yeah.
But I guess it’s what fascinates me is that you always have this tension between sort of, let’s get the process right, which is really important, and then how do we get the behaviours there.
And then I think what’s really interesting is how do we document that in a sort of coherent way so that not only have we documented the process, but we actually documented and have a way of pointing to the behaviours that we want to see to make the organisation work effectively.
So that was part of the conversation that that we’ve been having, which then led to us working together.
So yeah.
I mean, how do you see that, when you need to make that change, how does that transition? So when does that kind of tend to need to happen, or at what point do we, do we start becoming a lot more structured, time for those conversations? Well, it’s a, it’s a good question.
So I think I don’t think there’s a sort of a like, a, you know, if you’re at five people, you would need to do this.
But I do think you tend to see that organisations between about ten to thirty people start to have to transition from being sort of a collection of individuals who all have the same information and knowledge and can sort of all sit around the same table and share ideas and discuss and hash out problems as they emerge, to being an organisation that needs a bit more structure.
And that might be because you’re expanding into new markets or geographies or you’re just growing.
What you’re doing is working really well.
Equally, actually, it can be the opposite.
As you start to shrink or you’re in a challenging market, you’re needing to make redundancies.
Sometimes part of that is also going, oh, we need to, we need to make some changes in how we operate, in terms of the behaviours that we have, how we capture the knowledge that’s people in people’s heads, how we work together, and, actually, how do we describe what we’re doing, not just in terms of can we document how we should put information into our HR system or how we’re going to, you know, deal with disciplinary procedures, but, actually, what does it mean to be, you know, us as a company, us as an organisation, whether we’re growing or contracting, so that we, we’ve, we function the best and most effectively together.
So that’s the sort of the ways of working base.
And I think we underestimate the need to focus on that, but we also underestimate the need to sort of somehow capture and document that and how actually that feeds into almost all of the policy work that you might end up doing because you can, you can have a great policy that’s from a big company and you try to apply it to a small company and it won’t work, so you need to, you need to find that balance, don’t you? Is that, so you’ve got to bring along that philosophy, you know, what is our philosophy? Yeah.
This is what we have to bring forward.
And then I guess as well if you’re bringing, so particularly on the project that we work with, we were working with different countries, people were, well, it was global, wasn’t it? So that presents some other challenges.
Yeah.
And I think actually that’s a really interesting point, isn’t it? Because as a global organisation or working across cultures it’s really tempting to say, well, here’s our central approach.
Here’s our central manual.
But, actually, the, I think the nice nuance that you and Ellis brought in and that that sort of came out was this fundamental need really to go, okay.
Well, what does it look like in different places? Yes.
Yes.
There’s an overarching framework that we all sort of need to comply with, but how is that going to apply in this country versus that country? And for me, I think that’s the, that’s just the really interesting part of it, actually, when it comes right down to it, because it’s that nuanced detail that allows each thing to be slightly different within an overriding framework.
And I think that’s what I found is when you’re working with an organisation, instead of helping the, that sort of group of people who are the starters or startup leaders or the leaders who are trying to sort of contract the organisation or dealing with this sort of painful process of change, helping them actually articulate what they want to keep either as they grow or as they contract.
And what does that actually mean and look like in terms of the practicalities of how you work day to day? How do I make a decision about performance? How do I, how do I make sure I deal with travel in an efficient way that’s aligned to the behaviours that I actually want to see as a, as an occupational leader? Yeah.
Absolutely.
And I guess, so you’re bringing in lots of new people, lots of new ideas as well as you’re, as you’re growing and then disseminating those ideas to people as well, and what is our corporate culture, but also within that, within different countries, how does that practically work? What were some of the challenges faced, did you feel, with this? That’s a good question.
I mean, I feel like, you know, in, in this, in this specific instance, that there were sort of three major challenges.
So one was just genuine, like, why do we need to do this? No, which I think often comes out from lots of people.
And often, I think, from CEOs, because they’re, they, especially founder CEOs, aren’t process people.
They’re thinkers and ideas people.
And so as you said, to go, you maybe bring in a director of operations or a CEO who starts to think with more process.
And you have this, you have this tension in essence, between the founding CEO or the person who’s been driving growth and the person who’s thinking, okay, yes, but we need growth with process.
So I think that that is a challenge is, you know, how do you, how do you make the case for this? And, you know, obviously, in the case that, which brought us together with this, with this group of football clubs, their one of their solutions was to bring in external support to reduce the burden on the organisation and document this.
So rather than having to make all the departments do only and do the work, they brought in people who could help the departments capture that, and that sort of makes it more efficient.
I mean, then there’s the risk of losing ownership, so you have to strike that balance.
You need a, you need a good process to support that.
But that sort of, that tension, I think, is a challenge: getting people to understand why this, this is important and why it matters.
I think calibrating it to the right level is almost always a challenge.
Because what I’ve often seen, and I think, is you tend to have people who can see the need for process.
It usually comes more from larger organisations or more mature organisations, and therefore want to apply, often want to apply sort of more robust, more detailed, more, quote, unquote, heavy.
You know, it’s not necessarily heavy process, but process that’s appropriate for a different size and scale and type of organisation.
And so on one hand, I think, actually, one of the challenges, and I think one of the challenges we faced, was finding the right calibration point for how much process should you bring in.
How, what does that look like? What’s the difference between sort of the implied knowledge and what’s written down? How do you capture the sort of broad framework without going so far that it stops giving people the flexibility and the space that they’ve thrived in for many years? So I think that’s sort of, that’s sort of the second challenge really, is that calibration piece.
How heavy or how detailed do we actually need to go? And finding the right balance really matters.
Yeah.
Do you think that, you know, because obviously bringing in people from outside, as you’re an external consultant, obviously we’re external consultants as well, how do you think that helps with the project we run? You know, we have that outside perspective.
Is that helpful or not helpful? Yeah.
That was a really good question.
I think it is helpful.
I think I sort of fundamentally believe that part of this is often you can do it internally, you can do it externally.
The real question you need to ask yourself is, do we have the support around us to ask good questions? And I think in our project where we, where we really added value was that we were helping the organisation ask good questions.
You know, what do you need to document? What would this look like? What are you missing that you maybe need? You know, do you need to be as heavy and intensive in this regard? How can we capture that more effectively? Okay.
In other sectors, this is what good practice looks like.
What do you, what of this good practice do you want to bring in, or do you need in your organisation? So I think I don’t think that necessarily has to come from somebody who’s outside the organisation, but I think often it comes quite naturally from bringing in external consultants, not as so much to do everything, but actually as a genuine partner in thinking through where you’re going and that journey.
And maybe that’s sort of the third point really, if the first point is about, you know, getting this balance right between process, not process, the second is, like, how much process is enough, and, actually, the third, the third is that, is that that it needs to be a discussion.
It can’t just be owned by the COO or the director of finance.
And that’s where I think, again, external consultants can be really helpful, is that sort of partnership conversation around, okay.
If you’re in this department, if you’re in IT, you actually need to own the IT policy.
If you’re in finance, you have to own the finance policy.
But equally, if you’re in, in this case, you know, say, football operations or football performance, you have to own the policy or the framework that you’re putting in place, and you have to recognise that there is a reason for documenting it and establishing it more formally in the organisation.
Equally, if you’re the board, you need to own the policy process.
So that sort of, for me, that, that partnership piece is actually really, really important, both within the organisation, but then how you work with and how, you know, people like yourselves and myself can help organisations actually have that conversation and just have slightly better conversations.
Yeah.
So you’re capturing a culture, are you? Yeah.
Yeah.
That’s the best way to phrase it.
And it’s, you’re bottling the culture, actually.
Do that, yeah.
No.
I mean, it’s a really good point.
Right? You, like, that is what we’re trying to do.
We’re trying to bottle a culture.
And I think, well, I mean, in our case, I think what’s really fascinating, right, is that the longer an organisation has existed without writing something down or articulating it, the more they’re sort of in a deeply embedded and informal arrangement.
And it’s fascinating.
So I think that part of that challenge is how do you get people to surface that so that, actually, you capture what is useful? And some informal arrangements aren’t good.
Right? Sometimes cultures develop where no one’s really sort of thought about it, but, unintentionally, you’ve ended up with a group of people who fly business class and a group of people who don’t fly business class.
And it has nothing to do with the way the organisation actually wants to operate.
But if it, that actually becomes quite a toxic piece of culture that sort of floats through the organisation, and that’s in, in a hundred percent to do with just allowing culture to develop organically.
And so I think the first step is sometimes to go, okay.
Well, what is it that we need policy, quote, unquote, on? In, in essence, I think often we forget that policy is culture.
So what is, like, what are we documenting about our culture? The way we travel, the way we manage performance, the way we treat each other and our employees, the way we support learning and development, you know, the way we manage information, all of those are elements of culture.
So you need to sort of come up with that framework, and then you start to need to think through, which is why I think that, you know, yourselves as Cherryleaf were really helpful, was just starting to put stuff down on paper, so people don’t quite know what they want to say because they’re like, well, we’ve never had to document this before.
Just having something on paper for people to go, oh, that’s not, exactly.
It gives people something to take to think about, doesn’t it? And you put something up and you know, it’s like, okay.
So let’s get that discussion started.
And then, you know, we’re really finding out what our values are, what direction we want to go in, how is this going to work in this country, is this going to work in another country, and so on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think, and I think that sort of, that sort of tension is so important.
And then, and then you get, can get into, okay.
Well, what is that actually going to look like? And then I think you go a step further in perhaps more one-to-one conversations or some of the interviews, and you actually have to ask people who decides and on what basis.
Because that decision making, we, I think we sort of forget, is so inherently part of culture.
And sometimes, we’re a little bit too, what’s the right word? We’re sort of too blase and think, oh, well, we don’t need to worry about who decides because as we’re growing, we’ve been, we’ve been quite vertical.
Or as we’re shrinking, you know, we don’t need to rethink that because that’s already articulated.
But, actually, who decides is a very important part of the culture and the dynamics.
So rechecking that on a consistent basis, I think, is perhaps the most important thing you can do.
Yeah.
So it’s been quite interesting when we bring in the kind of roles and responsibilities part of it, it’s saying, you know, well, who dealt with this? Who’s responsible for this? You can see people are, okay, we’ve got to think about that now.
As she was saying before, it’s just kind of quite organic how it happens before and then you get, you know, the growth, as we saw with this organisation, and it’s actually, you know, this needs to be a bit more structured now, whilst not losing their inherent values.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it’s that, improve the structure, keep your values, and then I think it’s like the, communicate it and communicate that it is a work in progress.
That thing, you know, all policy, all culture needs to be constantly sort of tended to.
And so, what does that process look like to sort of move you, move you through that, that journey? And I think that’s a, that’s a really interesting and important challenge to an organisation: don’t just write policies.
Don’t just capture your culture, but actually think about how you’re going to tend to that culture and you’re going to sort of keep it healthy and alive as you move through your journey.
Yeah.
I think the interesting thing with this organisation, obviously, there was a lot of buy-in from senior management and so, you know, there was a lot of dissemination of the policy that really bought into it, I felt, which is massively helpful, of course, because that gets the buy-in from the whole organisation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I agree.
I think I think we were quite lucky in our case that there was a lot of buy-in.
Yeah.
What I often felt was there was a bit of a negotiation, again, somewhere between the sort of team that that was more from, quote, about the start-up phase and the team that would come in.
Yeah.
And was trying to sort of formalise and stabilise and not necessarily undermine the culture because they genuinely valued the culture that existed.
But yeah.
But to, but to sort of help articulate that culture more effectively.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think, because sometimes you’re changing behaviours, aren’t you? It’s, I think you just hit the nail on it.
I think that’s exactly what you’re trying to do.
And I think that’s the real challenge: you can see the culture that you have, and you can see the culture that you want to capture in, in the policy.
And most of the time, those two are going to be pretty aligned.
But every once in a while, you’re like, oh, like the example of the travel policy, say.
You’ve ended up with a culture that actually doesn’t reflect your values of sort of equality and being a sort of equal sort of a company.
So how do you articulate one to the other? And what does that look like and then how do you actually navigate that with, within the conversations with the, that the team has? Yeah.
And how do you support that change, that continual growth, and keep that going? And I think you’re right.
We did have a lot of buy-in from that particular organisation, you know, very, very proactive, very keen to make those changes.
And I guess they’re going to be supporting the people that work in the organisation.
There’s a little buy-in with that.
And then I guess as the changes bed in, the frameworks become, well, they are the norm then, aren’t they? They are the framework for working.
Yeah.
And I think that’s that point of sort of making it real, isn’t it? That you sort of, you sort of go through the process of sort of design, implementation, applying, refine, and then it starts to become part of the day-to-day piece of how we could, how people behave and transact and work together.
Yeah.
And I mean, that, that will, that check? That takes time.
And I think we can see that happening as we’ve been through this, this project, haven’t we? And we’re coming to the end now.
I think you’ve, you left a while back, didn’t you? You’ve missed, yeah.
No.
It’s, I mean, it’s true, isn’t it? Because I think you can see it happening, and it takes, it does take time to sort of embed and build in.
And I think you guys would say with this particular project, I obviously sort of helped kick it off, but then we did reach the point where I’d, I’d definitely done what was needed doing.
And it was an opportunity then for me to sort of move on and sort of send a way to lead you to finish it off in an effective and efficient way.
Yes, that’s where we’re at now, and so what’s your latest adventures that you’ve moved on to? Are you doing anything similar at the moment or something completely different? No.
I mean, it’s a great, it’s a good question.
So I, I’ve, you know, since I, since I’ve left that piece of work that I was doing with the two of you, I’ve moved on to do, to do some very similar things with just different organisations.
My most recent thing is actually doing some work for the British government looking at how they, how they, how they work and act in a, in a slightly different way now that they brought the sort of different parts of the foreign office apparatus together, so that they can continue to have as much impact with less money.
So we’ve been looking a lot at behaviours fundamentally, and how they, how that shows up in their day-to-day work and what processes and procedures they need to actually put in place to make those behaviours sticky, and to enable their sort of day-to-day interactions and engagement.
So, yeah, it’s actually, it’s actually been really, really interesting.
And, you know, we’ve done a fair bit of other work with some different organisations on just trying to help them understand their cultures and how they work and actually how they lead going forward, but not quite as much as on documenting culture and policy.
So hopefully, there’s an opportunity for us to bring the two things back together, isn’t it? We would always be open to that.
Thank you so much, it’s been really interesting.
I thank you very much for your time and, yeah, Ben French everybody, thank you so much.
Well, thank you so much, Ginny, that has been really enjoyable and very much a great pleasure, so thanks.
My thanks once again to Ben for taking the time to have this conversation with Cherryleaf.
If you’d like more information about Ben and the work he does or if you’d like to get in touch with him, you can visit his website at ben-french.com.
Thanks for listening.
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