In order for companies to viably scale up, CEOs must also scale up their leadership. It’s a heavy lift to expand the size of the team, evolve the product, increase market impact, and increase investment. Just as critical, the CEO must also have an understanding of their overused competencies that served them in growing the company to this point, and now gets in the way of taking the company further. It is a paradox of growth that requires the willingness to shift to other competencies that will result in continued momentum.
The 3 most common CEO leadership competencies that get over-used and turn into liabilities are:
Competency Toward Action And Momentum
- You are not afraid to work hard, and willing to do any job that’s needed
- The inherent challenges motivate and excite you
- Decisions are based on what will keep forward momentum
- You hire people like you, if they’re not hard workers and doers, they don’t last long in your organization
- You set aggressive deadlines and keep score of those team members who aren’t able to meet them
- You move quickly and its hard for your team to keep up with your response speed expectations
Competency Toward Vision and Opportunities
- You can forecast what the future will look like
- You anticipate what’s coming and create strategies to address it
- Decisions are based on what keeps the options open
- You get frustrated with your teams because they’re always 5 steps behind you
- You wonder if you have the right team because they don’t seem to understand the opportunities you bring to them
- Your team moves too slow so the opportunities aren’t brought to fruition
Competency Toward Achievement and Success
- You are hyper focused on the plan and goals
- You leverage efficiencies and effectiveness to fulfill the plan
- Decisions are based on what’s the efficient choice
- If your peers don’t line up with your plans, you disregard them
- Your pragmatism serves decision making for the plan, however, it doesn’t serve your relationships
- Your desire to have an untarnished personal brand gets in the way of your authenticity
Here are the 5 competencies that will bring balance to the overused competencies, and power the scale up of the company.
- Pair your action orientation with a people orientation. In order to scale up our output, we need others to do the work with us. Everything we do is through relationships. Thus relationship building enables us to scale up companies.
- Focus, decision making, and the space to accomplish work is important to every individual. Without this, employees get demotivated, become overly dependent on leadership, and lack accountability. A written strategy, clear articulated goals, and consistent focusare key enablers of employee independence and achievement that leads to scaling up a company.
- Trust with a manager is non-negotiable for team members to take risks, push against obstacles, and learn from failure. These are the building blocks of scaling up a company. According to HBR’s article “Begin With Trust”, trust has 3 drivers:
- Authenticity – I experience the real you
- Logic – I know you can do it; your reasoning and judgement are sound
- Empathy – I believe you care about me and my success
- As a company’s business grows, the skills needed to serve the business and product becomes more diverse. Diversity in hiring, in other words, hiring people who have different skills and are different from us, breaks group think and expands the solution set you have to apply against challenges that arise when scaling up a company.
- Respect the organizational structure. As your business grows, so does your headcount. Companies start out with a flat structure, then teams are formed, and reporting lines can be seen on org charts. You once were in the team. Now you lead in front of the company. This is a significant shift. Anytime that you go back to being in the team, you get in the way of your managers’ leading their team, become a distraction to team members, and you are not working on the highest value in your role as CEO.
Elevate your CEO Leadership Potential
Choosing to be CEO is also choosing the discomfort of change and growth to fulfill mission and passion. What I have observed in the CEOs that I have coached is those who successfully ascend each stage of their company’s growth did so because they themselves gained a deeper understanding of their competencies. They wielded their talent and competencies as deep knowledgeable experts of themselves, and invested in those around them to do the same.
What resonated with you from this article? Would you like a deeper exploration into any of these competencies? Contact me here.