1st Key Shift: Founder(s) to Leadership Team

There are 4 key shifts that a startup needs to make in order to be successful in their scaling-up journey. The 1st Shift is from Founder(s) competence & expertise to a Strong, Effective & Cohesive Leadership Team

If your Leadership Team is under performing, how are you contributing by over/under-functioning? Is the monkey on your back? Or is it time to learn new tricks?

Watch this 2 mins video that talks about this shift.

TRANSCRIPT:

Shift 1: From Founders’ competence to Strong Leadership Team.

When you are a startup, success is all about the Founder(s), their expertise, network, productivity and competence is what brings people together to birth a new commercial product. 

As a scaleup, your next stage of success depends on an effective and cohesive leadership team. Most people hire competent team members, but then go back to the same way of working. These Founders need new skills to actively shift from “doing” to delegating, empowering, and building a healthy team and holding them accountable for the operations.

This transition is not easy, because it’s counterintuitive and requires a change in the habits that have contributed to their initial success. Most CEOs, out of good intentions and in the interest of time, constantly step in to put out the operational fired. The irony is, very often, most of these urgent fires are symptoms of this important but subtle shift not happening (urgency always overrules the important).

These symptoms usually manifest as over-functioning and under-functioning behaviours. An over-functioning CEO will definitely guarantee a under-functioning team (closed loop system). The monkey is always on the CEO’s back. As for an under-functioning CEO, they either lack the skills, or are unaware of what is required for the team to be performing effectively and cohesively. If you are busy doing your team’s work, then you are not performing the CEO’s job of setting the direction, developing a strategy, making decisions, leading, extracting and resolving ideological and operational conflicts.

So, if your team is underperforming, ask: How are you contributing by either over-functioning or under-functioning? Is the monkey on your back (over-functioning) or is it time to learn new tricks (under-functioning)?