From Start-Up to Grown-Up - Grow Your Leadership to Grow Your Business by Alisa Cohn

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. You’ve gone from start-up to scale-up. You’ve followed the advice in this book, so you’re managing your psychology and have integrated healthy habits. You’re serious about creating psychological safety and an intentional culture. And it’s all working! You’ve got more customers, more business, more funding. You’ve also got more people. You’re 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 in—the OG (the old guard, or as some say, the Original Gangsters)—are managers, but you have the sense that they’re struggling. Some of the early employees who aren’t managers are clamoring for promotions. You don’t think they’re ready for it, but since you don’t have a formal feedback and appraisal process set up, it’s 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.

You’ve hit the bend in the road where you have staff and need somebody to take care of the staff. It’s time to step back and reflect about where you’re going and how to get there—again. In this chapter, I’ll tell you why you need a Head of People to help and what that person should do. I’ll 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. I’ll 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 creative—fresh 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; it’s always just a leg of the journey.

Now you have fifty or sixty people—way 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 don’t 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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