Are you the limiting factor in your strategy?
Are you the limiting factor in your strategy?
How to know if your organization has outgrown you and what to do about it.
Post Summary
This post will explain how to determine if you’re the limiting factor in your organization’s strategy.
A new strategy often requires new skills and leaders need to determine the best way to acquire those skills.
Failing to adapt can be disastrous for the organization and leaders need to take action quickly.
As always, there are several options that can be explored including coaching, changing responsibilities, a different approach and putting someone else in the role.
Housekeeping
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Be sure to check out the footnotes for further ideas and background information.
I. Are you limiting the success of your strategy?
It’s not enjoyable to think that we could be the very thing that is limiting our organization. After all, we (perhaps more than anybody else) want our organization to succeed and grow. How could we want one thing but act in a completely different manner?
This question always makes me think of what is perhaps one of the greatest book titles ever written, Marshall’s Goldsmith's excellent book What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There1. Even if you never read the book, the title alone will make you think.
Marshall argues that the skills and behaviors that get us to a specific destination are usually not the same skills and behaviors needed for the next one.
An individual contributor, such as a sales rep, has to learn how to sell, how to manage the CRM, how to close deals and so forth. He or she will need to become excellent at these specific skills. However, if this person wants to become a Sales Director or Manager, he or she will need to learn new skills, such as coaching individuals, while letting go of the skills that earn them their promotion.
When an organization formulates a new strategy, the management team will be presented with a list of new priorities and a list of skills needed to accomplish them. When Netflix transitioned from DVD rentals into producing their own content, they needed people with new skills, such as being able to negotiate with content owners like Disney. The people who helped the company succeed with DVDs left the company.2
Let’s look at the different ways in which leaders may be forced into new roles and why failing to adapt can be disastrous for any strategy.
II. New roles and why failure to adapt is catastrophic
Leaders in the tech startup world are intimately familiar with the need to change their role as circumstances evolve.
A tech startup is a unique type of organization. It can grow very quickly, from 10 employees to 500 in just a couple of years3. They are often going against established competitors and regulations (think Uber or Coinbase) and receive hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital to make it all happen.
This is why it is rare to see the same person—such as Mark Zuckerberg—lead the organization through all the different stages of growth.
It’s not merely about skills. There’s also a question about preferences. Managing a public company such as Meta/Facebook, is not the same as managing a private 25 person company where you know everybody on a first name basis. Neither is better but each situation demands a specific type of leader.
If a leader stays in the same role for too long, the organization will struggle to go after all available opportunities.
Think of leaders who are very good at making decisions with a handful of individuals but are not comfortable making them with hundreds of people4. Or think of leaders who can communicate to a small team they can physically see in front of them but cannot communicate to multiple remote teams, spread all over the world.
The lack of adaptation slows decision-making and the implementation of a strategy. A leader in this situation needs to act quickly to avoid falling or worse, running the organization into the ground.
Luckily, there are several options that can help leaders deal with these limiting factors.
III. Moving forward means doing something different
Before a leader can take any of the actions below, they need to recognize (and accept) that their role needs to change. In my experience, most leaders know when their skills have hit a ceiling because they have been told by their advisors, peers, colleagues or spouses.
In the rare situations when a leader is oblivious to what is going on, it is either because they haven’t fully accepted their own limitations or because they have yet to see the damaging effects. Time tends to resolve both.
Keep in mind that the goal is not to keep you in the same role e.g. President, CEO, Executive Director but to put someone with the necessary skills in this role.
First, you can explore coaching for learning new skills and behaviors. In the previous example, I mentioned decision-making and communication, two elements that can be learned. A good coach can help you see different ways to make decisions or to communicate more effectively, while guiding you along the way.
There are limits to what kinds of skills can be coached but I believe the limits are determined by an individual’s preferences. If you don’t feel comfortable with numbers, it is unlikely you could ever learn the necessary financial skills to be a CFO.
Second, you can change the responsibilities of your role. Steve Jobs was famously heavily involved in the design of new products, offering detailed feedback during product development. Tim Cook, on the other hand, doesn’t have the same strength in product design, and has reduced the CEO’s involvement in product engineering.5
There are no hard rules on what a leader should or should not do. Every role can be adapted to fit your unique situation. Think about what responsibilities you would excel at and what responsibilities could be given to other individuals.
Third, you can change your approach. One of the key activities for a leader of a non-profit organization is fundraising.
A non-profit leader may not feel comfortable speaking in front of large groups but suddenly becomes Bill Clinton when talking to one person. Instead of trying to teach this leader how to become a better public speaker, the fundraising approach can focus on getting high potential donors into one-on-one conversations.
Fourth, you can put a different person in your role. A tech startup who is about to go public will require someone who can work with investment bankers, lead the fundraising “roadshow” and manage an entire organization, ahead of one of its most important days. No amount of coaching, delegation or a different approach may be enough.
It can be tough to think of putting a different person in your role but don’t see it as an automatic exit. You could take another role, better suited to your skills and preferences.
The same leader who can no longer manage a large organization may be perfectly suited to lead a small innovation unit. The leader who is about to retire, can stay as an advisor or board champion for the new President.
Your choice will be determined by what is the best for the organization. The choices themselves are also not mutually exclusive. Leaders can attempt coaching before trying to change their approach or put a different person in their role.
You may realize that you’re the limiting factor in your organization’s strategy but it doesn’t have to stay that way. You always have more choices than you can imagine.
Ruben
Marshall’s great book dives deeper into how to make the leap into something new. It focuses more on individuals but plenty of ideas can be applied to organizations.
Netflix walks the talk when it comes embracing change. NPR has a short episode talking about the people who let go (or left the company) during the transition into streaming.
Ycombinator has a good overview on the different stages for those not familiar with this unusual industry.
In recent times, Spotify announced layoffs due to an increase in slow decision-making, among other reasons. Large organizations require different leaders to ensure that things don’t get bogged down.
Tim Cook has done a fantastic job at Apple and there are clear differences between his style of management and Job’s. People worried that no one could replace Jobs (most likely true) but not enough people thought about what a different kind of person would do on the job.