More than half of my clients are vibrant & purpose-driven international tech start-up & scale-up organizations. These organizations want to position their leaders, managers & leadership team in such a way that they are capable of handling today’s as well as tomorrow’s many challenges. When working with C-suite leaders, the need emerged to build an assessment tool that would help each C-level leader to identify very distinct development stages that tech companies are going through AND the associated individual development stages C-level leaders need to go through in order to successfully lead the company through its development stage. That way these leaders gain clarity on which differentiating business & leadership skills they need to build to successfully lead their company to tackle the challenges that are inherent to their company’s current development stage and to prepare for tackling the challenges that they will face when they’ll hopefully move into the next company development stage. The great news is that the first version of this assessment tool is ready to go live as of now (wouhou!!!) & will be soon implemented with a first client (thanks for your trust!!!). In this post & the two consecutive ones, I’ll share more about the tool. Feel free to respond & share your precious feedback along the way.
Let’s start with the 4 company development stages: each company stage represents a camp in order to gradually reach the Mount Everest summit at 8850m of altitude. Getting to each camp comes with its own challenges. Hereafter some questions that C-level leaders might be confronted with in order to be able to reach each camp:
- Camp 1: start-up stage: Do I have clear business plan? Do I have a product/service that’s good enough? How can I get early adopter stakeholders on board (investors, customers, internal experts in key domains)? What choices do I make to keep cash burning under control?
- Camp 2: acceleration stage: What resources do I need to accelerate top line growth from a financial, sales, marketing, operations, HR, IT, product, engineering & data perspective? Do I have the right cross-functional leadership team to lead these efforts?
- Camp 3: niche leadership stage: In which key areas do we need better products/services, processes, systems & people skills in order to become a leader in a niche? How to best acquire & integrate a company?
- Camp 4: overall leadership stage: How do we take our social, societal & environmental responsibility as a major economic player, in the short & longer term?
In next post we’ll explore together the associated individual development stages each C-level leader we’ll need to go through to be able to reach each camp.