People
With a well thought out organization in place, you can focus on filling your management positions with people best suited to execute the defined roles and responsibilities to implement your venture’s strategy.
Recruit the right people
Attracting the right people to fill your management team is one of the most important tasks of the CEO. The people you bring onto your team must possess the right individual and collective skills, market knowledge and passion.
Often early-stage venture founders tend bring on people with whom they are close or have worked in the past. While it is important to know, trust, and be able to collaborate with the people in your team, it is essential to be rigorous in identifying the right skills and experience needed to fulfill the roles and responsibilities that you have defined as needed.
Once you have determined these attributes, explore multiple channels to find the right people. It is frequently unnecessary to hire an expensive search consultant – with the right effort in networking and using the web, most ventures can generate a strong pool of candidates from whom to choose.
To maximize your chances of success, clearly define your ideal profile candidates, as specifically as possible – including the education, companies, positions and geographies you would ideally like to see on their resumes. Then seek out people that closely match your ideal.
Equally important, clearly define your value proposition to prospective executives. Good people have many career options – why should they select your business as a venue for their talents and energies?
Provide direction, coaching, feedback and rewards
Hiring good people is certainly not enough. No matter how experienced your executives, each venture and each team has its own unique circumstances and challenges. Just like world-class athletes, even experienced executives need direction, coaching, feedback and rewards to maximize their individual performances.
Giving direction is about agreeing to the goals to be achieved, and the broad guidelines on how to get there. It is not detailed micro-managing. It begins with the focus and responsibilities you assign to each executive. Building on that foundation, tailor the amount of direction you give to the needs of each team member. With some, you may only need to provide little more than inspiration; others may need you to be more specific.
Recognize the strengths and skills or your executives, but also be alert to their individual development needs. Whether you personally provide coaching or use a range of other formal and informal training methods, it is critical that you put in place a process for continually improving your team’s individual skills and knowledge. Successful companies integrate training into their core management practices and make it a source of competitive advantage.
Provide feedback regularly, primarily informally and occasionally more formally. Most successful ventures adopt an open culture in which team members are open and willing to receive and provide feedback. In addition to direct manager feedback through performance and development plan review and informal conversations, feedback can be solicited from peers, team members and even external stakeholders. Feedback should be paired closely with professional development to build competencies in areas of need.
Executives join ventures for a range of both financial and non-financial rewards. Translate the value proposition you offered to your team when you hired them into tangible rewards that meet their needs and motivate the performance your venture needs to be successful.
Change executives when necessary
As mentioned above, with rapidly growing and changing innovation-based ventures, management team changes often need to be made relatively frequently. There could be many reasons - the business grows to a level beyond the skill-set of the incumbent, the business needs change or external market conditions cause unexpected stresses.
As the venture’s leader, you must place the good of the company above personal relationships. Each executive must be regularly and objectively assessed against his or her goals and responsibilities, and those who either can’t or won’t meet the required standards must be replaced. This is probably one of the responsibilities most CEOs like the least – yet it is vital for the health and success of the venture. Very few venture CEOs feel they let people go too soon – almost always their rueful observation is that they held onto people for too long.
It is important in making such changes to do so within the right legal and ethical parameters, placing a high value on the lives of those affected, and ensuring that the way in which changes are carried out minimize distractions to the task at hand and cultural upheaval.
Next we will explore the importance of teamwork.
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