Entrepreneurship Tips — Leadership

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...

Sure, but only a certain percentage. Usually 5% to 15%. These are the ones willing to work hard, develop themselves, learn more rapidly and develop EQ and people skills. Google The Peter Principle to understand better. Management is an art, not a skill. An art requires vast experience, and literally rewires your brain neuroplasticity over the years. See Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. You cannot learn it in school. Only practice it for many years to hone your talents there. The fact is, most people are lazy and do not want to continue to develop, think for themselves and excel. Only that...

Easy. COOs deal with short-term management and daily, weekly and monthly issues. This is the “Care and feeding” of employees to coordinate resources and track results. CEOs work more on the long-term from 1 to 5 years out. CEOs also spend their time, maybe as much as 50%, on proper staffing at the management level, coaching this team up and developing these managers to grow professionally to take on more responsibility with that growth. Often the CEO will spend 50% of their time divided between: Strategy development, customer contact (direct input), and optimizing processes for marketing, sales and finance. In...

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...

The most important traits of quality leaders are integrity, good management and people skills, the ability to see the future (need or market) and communicate that vision to their team and others. Obviously, some domain/industry expertise in the areas you are executing.  Some may call this “Selling the vision” and that can be to employees, investors, vendors or anyone.  A leader aligns all parties needed to proceed forward, including all stakeholders.  I define leadership as when you do not have to look back because you know people are following you because they want to and believe in accomplishing the mission. Not because...