Adjusting Your Management Style To Your Company's Stage, A miniseries on practical leadership focus for start-ups and emerging growth company senior executives.

This series will explore how leadership focus and skills must evolve as a company grows from a raw startup to an expansion stage, successful enterprise.  Most seminars, texts, and articles talk about leadership generically as if it had the same requirements in all situations. It does not, and in fact, the key elements of success at each stage of a company's development are always very different.

Leadership is a skill that is hard to develop, but usually easy to recognize.  It is an ability some are born with, but it also is one that anyone can develop with some guidance and practice. Usually, you need the outside perspective of someone without any agenda or bias to improve. We all are unaware of things about ourselves that everyone else is aware of. These things must be identified and improved to be a successful...

Jay Abrams, an excellent marketing guru, and the speaker says there are only three ways to grow your business:
1) More customers,
2) Higher average sales/revenue per customer and
3) A higher purchase frequency from your customers.
Although this is a great model to divide and attack the problem, it is more classified into categories of ways than actual ways to grow your company.  Luckily, we can come up with hundreds of ways to grow a business, and the tough part is deciding where to put your efforts.  One theory is that with ever-growing sales and marketing costs, it is usually easier to get more revenue from existing customers than to find new customers. Yet, most businesses put more time and effort into customer acquisition than retention and upselling (#2 and #3).  This varies greatly from business to business and is a function of the actual acquisition costs of a customer, what else they might need when they need your product, and many other factors. 

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Roadmap To Your Vision

all It "Brand", call it "Marketing", call it your focus, niche, USP, passion, core value-added -- or whatever you want, but today you need all these things to build a successful company.

Expectations of Managers

It is the goal of all quality organizations to provide its employees with a superior opportunity to grow, both individually and as professionals. Nothing has a greater impact than hiring the right people and having them develop simultaneously with the company’s own growth. It has been frequently shown that appreciation and growth can be stronger motivators for an employee than money and can result in reduced turnover, improved customer service and ultimately generates superior profits for the company. With this in mind, it is best to lay out clear expectations for performance so that employees can achieve both personal and professional growth. Employees should understand that their employer is committed to making every effort to educate them so that they can expand their horizons and take on new responsibilities over time.

A system like this provides some transparency to the “mysterious” process of promotion and professional growth...

Expectations of Executives

It is the goal of all qualified organizations to provide their employees with a superior opportunity to grow, both individually and as professionals. Nothing has a greater impact than hiring the right people and having them develop simultaneously with the company’s own growth. It has been frequently shown that appreciation and growth can be stronger motivators for an employee than money and can result in reduced turnover, improved customer service, and ultimately generates superior profits for the company. With this in mind, it is best to layout clear expectations for performance so that employees can achieve both personal and professional growth. Employees should understand that their employer is committed to making every effort to educate them so that they can expand their horizons and take on new responsibilities over time.

A system like this provides some transparency to the “mysterious” process of promotion and professional growth...

 Expectations of Individual Contributors

It is the goal of all qualified organizations to provide their employees with a superior opportunity to grow, both individually and as professionals. Nothing has a greater impact than hiring the right people and having them develop simultaneously with the company’s own growth. It has been frequently shown that appreciation and growth can be stronger motivators for an employee than money and can result in reduced turnover, improved customer service, and ultimately generates superior profits for the company. With this in mind, it is best to layout clear expectations for performance so that employees can achieve both personal and professional growth. Employees should understand that their employer is committed to making every effort to educate them so that they can expand their horizons and take on new responsibilities over time.

A system like this provides some transparency to the “mysterious” process of promotion and...

So many to choose from that deceive people and can even cause the failure of a company. Here are just a sample:

1. Your “idea is worth millions”. There is no such thing. As by definition, anyone can steal an “idea” and do it better, with more capital and/or a better team. Anyone with just an idea will not raise any capital. You need a team, plan, traction. Even a patent (exclusive on the implementation of an idea, not an idea) only gets 5% royalty. The other 95% goes to the people who invest and execute. How many people had the idea of the electric car before Elon Musk started growing Tesla? There were hundreds of competitors to Facebook, and almost any other company you can name. But only the few that do everything right will survive the Darwinian world of the marketplace. 

2. Anyone can start a company - We have a new company failure rate of over 85%, and a new product failure rate of over 90%, because people greatly underestimate the...

MBO and OKR is a proven way for companies to improve performance dramatically. But it is not a panacea either. It is just a structure and cadence for good management to insure great communications and cooperation between people and areas of the business. And one very good manager should use - no exceptions. 

To be fair OKR is just a repackaged (plagiarized) version of Management By Objective (MBO) created by The Father of Management (Science) Peter Drucker in the 1960s. All his books are timeless, and I highly recommend any serious manager read them all over time. Start with The Daily Drucker.

That said in research (and development), which I did full-time for 8 years in my earlier career, there are more unknowns, and it is harder to set clear timelines for things, mainly because the next steps depend on the result of earlier steps and also iteration.  However, you can still have release dates and other things agreed to -- you just may not have exact expectations on what a...

Training like this is best done with an ongoing Management Development (MD) program. This is also often called Learning and Development (LD), or Management Development (MD). Management is an art, not a skill. Hence, only actual practice and experience increases someone’s abilities. Of course, a foundation of knowledge of best practices, styles and some structure is very helpful and that can be learned.  Models, rules of thumb and reading will help a lot. It will just not be enough. 

Any company over about 10 employees should have ongoing monthly or quarterly education goals for managers, or ideally all employees. This allows people to grow with the company, creates loyalty and is a big win-win. This does not have to be expensive. I generally recommend about 2% to 3% of management salaries for an MD program.  This can pay an RPI that is 10 to 100X. 

Some MD can be just reading assignments. The key is knowing the best books for a given employee at that...

This is kind of a silly question, as these jobs are so very different. But it is something many do not understand well and so needs a good answer too.  This answer is mainly in the context of technology companies. As a CTO in a service company where technology is not the product is a different animal. 

A CTO understands technology deeply and broadly.  And also, business considerations like development and operations costs, risk and development life cycles of products.  They guide an organization in the use of newer technology, across the organization and all its IT, software, hardware and products.  They would be responsible to see the organization is keeping up with and/or passing competitors to use technology strategically for competitive advantage, cost savings, speed or other advantage in their industry.

In a tech startup, the CTO is often a cofounder. They need to have a deep understanding of technology AND broad understanding of business and even...