From Start-Up to Grown-Up - Grow Your Leadership to Grow Your Business by Alisa Cohn
Author:Alisa Cohn [Cohn, Alisa]
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
PART THREE
Managing the
Company
06
Growing and Growing
Up
Reflective Question: Have you worked with your managers to help them manage better?
Congratulations, your company is growing. Youâve gone from start-up to scale-up. Youâve followed the advice in this book, so youâre managing your psychology and have integrated healthy habits. Youâre serious about creating psychological safety and an intentional culture. And itâs all working! Youâve got more customers, more business, more funding. Youâve also got more people. Youâre way past hiring your friends and turning more and more to experienced people who have done this before. Hiring is still a headache.
Some of the first people you brought inâthe OG (the old guard, or as some say, the Original Gangsters)âare managers, but you have the sense that theyâre struggling. Some of the early employees who arenât managers are clamoring for promotions. You donât think theyâre ready for it, but since you donât have a formal feedback and appraisal process set up, itâs hard to have a rational conversation with them. People are also asking for more company kinds of things, like a better health plan, a career path, and, surprisingly, performance reviews.
Youâve hit the bend in the road where you have staff and need somebody to take care of the staff. Itâs time to step back and reflect about where youâre going and how to get thereâagain. In this chapter, Iâll tell you why you need a Head of People to help and what that person should do. Iâll talk about what your managers should be doing and how you can help get them there, coaching with useful performance feedback and appraisals, and providing
career development. Iâll emphasize why and how your people should cascade information up and down the ladder, and the need for clear goals and productive accountability.
Getting the Right People Person
The good and the bad of joining an early-stage start-up is that everyone is kind of making things up as they go. There is something exhilarating about that! And super creativeâfresh eyes and energy can achieve remarkable things! And it begins to work. You create your proof of concept or your minimum viable product (MVP). You get some customers and achieve your targets. Things go well and the company gets another round of funding, or, as I often tell the CEOs I coach, you earn the right to play again. Success is never a destination; itâs always just a leg of the journey.
Now you have fifty or sixty peopleâway too many for you to manage personally. People need roles and goals. They need managers to teach them, coach them, unblock obstacles, coordinate their work, and help them prioritize. You need managers to share the bigger picture with them and to reinforce your messages about direction and purpose. But you may be suspicious of how valuable management really is. The company needs structure, but you probably donât know how to build structure. And as a founder you may be allergic to structure (what is this, IBM?).
This is where it often starts to get messy. Many CEOs get the office manager to assume the role of Head of People.
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