Despite significant and sustained growth over the past few years, Clyde Group is still a small firm focused on building things from the ground up and growing its business, and that does come with its share of challenges. While its heart is usually in the right place, the firm can at time catastrophize over minor issues and invest significant time and resources in trying to fix them, while also ignoring deeper issues that merit attention.
• Challenges with work-life balance – This is not unique to Clyde Group, and is more a function of both client service industries in general and the communications field in particular, but it bears mentioning regardless. Depending on client demands and the constant need to generate new business, there can be early morning work, after hours work, weekend work, and more. Efforts are made to address these challenges, but whatever success they might have, they tend to wither in the face of those overarching business pressures.
• Inconsistency in addressing negative behavior – Management occasionally struggles to address employees who don't work well with others, particularly the more senior they are in the hierarchy. There's sometimes an "out of sight, out of mind" approach if an employee doesn't always behave with the professional and personal courtesies due to their coworkers, but are still "producing results" for the bottom line. The extent of this issue varies depending on the circumstances, but at its lowest points, it can result in talented employees leaving for greener pastures rather than putting up with the frustrations involved.
• “Reinventing the wheel” syndrome – As a young firm, Clyde Group, and has gone through many iterations and reforms of its basic structure and processes for getting work done. This is not a bad thing in a vacuum, and when it yields a clear winner in terms of a process improvement or efficiency boost, that’s all well and good. Clyde Group is certainly a more robust and sophisticated organization than it was 3 or 4 years ago. But just as often, this impulse tends to be “change for the sake of change”, as though someone looked at a calendar and realized a management structure or process is in danger of reaching its one-year anniversary, and thus needs to be thrown out and replaced immediately. It’s not always clear that a real problem has been identified, or a compelling solution developed to fix it, only that things apparently needed to change. This can be disorienting and distracting the longer you have worked at the firm.
• “HBR over real world experience” – management in general is good about trying to listen to employees and solicit their input and feedback on the firm’s growth and future, but there have been some struggles here as the firm has grown and evolved. Some changes or new initiatives at the firm seem to be inspired by whatever “pop management psychology” or “managing Millennials!” article is on the front page of the Harvard Business Review that week, rather than being tied directly to the circumstances and lived experience of the company itself.
