Growing Pains

What are Growing Pains and Why Are They Important?

When an organization has not been fully successful in developing the internal systems (infrastructure) it needs at a given stage of growth, it begins to experience growing pains.  Such "growing pains" are normal, expecially for rapidly growing firms, and represent an early warning sign for management.  If an organization does not take time to assess the severity of its growing pains and develop a plan to address them, management will find it increasingly difficult to deal with these problems, which can potentially put the existence of the organization at risk.

Dr. Eric Flamholtz, President of Management Systems, developed the Growing Pains Survey to measure the extent to which a company is facing problems transitioning from one stage of development to the next. The Growing Pains Survey is based on the idea that when an organization's infrastructure is not sufficiently well developed to support its revenue base, certain symptoms will emerge.