Visionary Leadership: How to Recapture the Entrepreneurial Spirit with 161 - 500 Employees

Visionary Leadership: How to Recapture the Entrepreneurial Spirit with 161 - 500 Employees

What a view. From where you sit, as the CEO of an organization with 161 – 500 employees, you have the right to be proud. How many of us ever sit back and simply bask in the pleasure of being successful? If you are like most CEOs, you spend very little time reflecting where you have come from – you move quickly on to your next challenge, your next successful endeavor. Stage 7, the Visionary stage of growth, offers great opportunity while throwing even larger challenges your way. Your focus should be on creating a future vision for your company which should include succession planning and the continual development of your leadership team. Making assumptions about alignment and perspective tends to backfire, requiring a decision-making process utilized by the leadership team to ensure good decisions are the norm. Stage 7 is rarefied air and it takes a great team to continue to grow smart. The leaders and managers need to engage their teams with a strong performance-based plan and track key indicators that highlight what’s going well and more importantly, what isn’t. Stage 7 is a complex period that requires strong vision and a deft touch. Challenge all of your assumptions as they relate to your vision, mission, your customer needs and products/services. Don’t allow your managers to simply rehash old issues and ignore outdated processes. Leadership in Stage 7 requires you to be relentless in encouraging new ideas, engaging people to step outside their comfort zones and at all costs avoiding falling back on the belief that what worked before will continue to work today. You need to master the art and science of leadership that provides role models in every department, teaching and mentoring other leaders to take on more responsibility and groom those leaders for the future. Recapturing the entrepreneurial spirit that you had when you were a much smaller, much more nimble company is critical. Identifying new opportunities, fostering exploration, identifying great talent, developing action plans and assigning the necessary resources to manifest those plans is your new paradigm. Now in Stage 7 (Visionary), your challenges center around being clear about your products and service offerings, ensuring your customers are not just satisfied but delighted with your company and the value it offers them and their ability to grow. You still need to help your leadership team understand how to make, manage and evaluate critical decisions that have long-term strategic impact. A company with up to 500 employees, will have a hefty bureaucracy to support it. That size brings different challenges than a CEO may have experienced in earlier stages of growth. Initial enthusiasm can become lost amid the day-to-day reality of the work. Passion and enthusiasm fade as the mission, the vision of the company get buried under mountains of regulations, procedures and processes. The pace of work slows down and nothing seems to happen when it needs to and there seems to be little connection between competence and success. The company loses the capacity to evaluate itself, and complacency becomes the norm. People simply forget how it felt when the company was smaller, where it was easier to know everyone, and there was an opportunity to connect to the CEO face-to-face and not just through a computer screen at the company’s annual meeting. The ability to teach your leadership team how to adapt and not be afraid of uncertainty will be one of your greatest challenges in this Visionary stage of growth.