C-level executives of tech scale-up companies very often aren’t aware of which equipment they need in order to climb Mount Everest. Or part 2 of when leadership development & company development stages come together.

In this post we’ll explore together the individual development stages each C-level leader we’ll need to go through in order to successfully lead the company through its development stage.

In the previous post, we explored 4 company development stages for tech companies: the start-up, acceleration, niche leadership & overall leadership stages. While the complexity of the challenges at each stage increases, so does the complexity of the required leadership posture: there’s no successful company evolution without the associated evolution of the leaders. This evolution can be organized in 3 dimensions: how does a C-level leader lead soft company topics (mission, vision, culture & people), hard company topics (strategy, organizational structure, processes, systems & tools) & lead him/herself (awareness, personality & leadership skills). A predefined list of 12 major individual challenges related to these 3 dimensions has been designed for each company stage in order to help leaders identify & focus on what matters most. A few examples:

• A leader in a start-up company development stage: be a role model of & regularly communicate the vision, mission & values to existing & new team members
• A leader in an acceleration company development stage: understand the need for more process/project/transformation management within the company (ex. OKR) & how own behaviour is enabling or preventing the successful roll-out of these initiatives
• A leader in a niche leadership company development stage: reduce the size of the leadership team, integrate (functional & geographical) areas to enhance collaboration, and delegate decision rights down the organization
• A leader in an overall leadership company development stage: further inquire & detach oneself from a pure achiever mindset into a transformational, impact driven one

When leaders review the predefined list of 12 major business & leadership challenges, they’ll be asked to add up to 3 challenges that are very specific to their own situation. The result will be a list of up to 15 requirements for a leader to be successful in a given company development stage. Individual performance gaps are identified against each of these requirements and as a next step only a few game changing individual development objectives. Only then can a major focused individual development journey be activated where old habits will be unlearned & new habits built. Just as an entrepreneur needs to have clear definition of the problem to be solved before launching a business, an executive leader needs clarity on the pivotal individual development areas he/she will focus on.

In the next post we’ll explore how leaders will be able to build new skills in the most effective way.

#leadership #CEO #Csuite #entrepreneurs #techscaleup #techstartup #frenchtech #next40 #frenchtech120 #technologyfast50 #mounteverest