March Edition

Happy Friday!?

This week, we're talking about the importance of alignment in your organization. Without it, guess what goes up? Costs.?

?Enjoy the read.

Today's update: 550 words /3 minute read

p.s. OHO Cannabis Connect is hosting an event for Ohio cannabis entrepreneurs, enthusiasts, and industry professionals looking to connect, learn, and thrive. This is a FREE event on March 27 in Cleveland,OH. David Belsky, CEO of FlowerHire and Jason Desentz, Managing Partner, HR Advisory at FlowerHire, will be there with many other Ohio leaders. Register to attend.

Alignment isn't a hope. It's a necessity

by Mike Siebold

The American cannabis workplace, much like its marketplace, is in flux. A business and its growth trajectory isn’t dotted with moments that are uniformly good or bad. You can learn from missed opportunities. You can choke on your growth. With so much change, alignment is the persistent measure a company needs to decipher and build a better tomorrow.?

?Why it matters in weed: Our last brief discussed career mobility within our space and how to empower employees and create more buy-in. An important characteristic of mobility is WHEN a manager decides an individual can take on new and added responsibilities. What is your internal process? How will the spans of control change when someone moves up or out? The true problem? A new role, a new person, and a new orientation all come with the potential for misalignment.?

Employee and managerial alignment seems simple enough. An organizational chart tells you the order of communication and oversight. When it changes, say adding a new subordinate or a dotted line to a separate department head, it is often the first instance where misalignment can occur. Layers can create conflicting priorities, leading to a lack of coordination and higher operational costs. It’s great to have effort, but it’s awful to have duplicative effort.?

A recent FlowerHire Advisory experience sheds light on this common experience.? An all-too-common expansion trajectory in cannabis organizations is growth by purchase and/or by velocity. FlowerHire started working with a competent and confident single-state operator that embarked on explosive growth, growing from one state to several and a few employees to hundreds in a short period of time. With that came informal organizational charts, inflated titles, expedited responsibilities, and retention issues. Misalignment became natural because pace dictated the needs, not the process.?

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Walking back from this commonplace dilemma started with the executive team. Working with us, we qualified the organization and its trajectory. Radical candor, from the C-suite down, led to new objectives, minimized duplicative processes, and brought focus to people and the roles they inhabited. The C-suite expectations up to that point couldn’t have imagined the change now occurring.?

Reading the smoke signals: As a leader or a newly minted manager in the cannabis space, here are some simple ways to align before the “mis.”?

• First, host a roundtable discussion with existing managers up and down the chain of command. Clarity and intentions are a better antidote to misalignment than chance and the wait-and-see approach.?
• Second, have a form of measurement. Engagement and duplicative efforts all require touch points as the new organization's plan takes flight.?
• Third, start from the top and revist the process. Mission, vision, and values should not morph as the business grows or right-sizes, but the business objectives and the alignment with the staff that spring from them have to.?

Get started: We have deep HR advisory experience with cannabis organizations at every stage of growth. Working with us will lead to more people in more seats over the long term. Send me a message if you want to chat.?

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FlowerHire Advisors guides cannabis companies to strategically improve their human capital processes for compliance, performance management, retention, compensation design, and other specific needs.

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