Primary Venture Partners reposted this
Today I was asked: What are the top 3 ways founders fail to become exceptional CEOs? At Primary Venture Partners, here is what we’ve seen: 1. Failure to Know Thyself: Your team wants to know how to succeed. If you don’t know your values, how you respond under stress, how you make decisions, how you like to give and receive feedback, and how someone can earn a gold star with you, then you will stumble along the way to building a talent-dense, high-performing organization. 2. Inability or Indifference to Recruiting: Every problem is a people problem. If you think recruiting is an administrative task that can be outsourced or deprioritized, then you’re lucky to have never worked with an underperformer or misfit. Hiring the wrong people is a fast path to wasting time, money, and effort. Putting in the upfront effort and commitment to selling, assessing, and onboarding employees hedges the likelihood that you will hire people who are likely to succeed on your team. 3. Lack of Alignment: A CEO's job is to create alignment and reinforce clarity. If a CEO isn’t repeating the team's vision, purpose, and goals, as well as ending every conversation with closure, alignment, and accountability, team members will accidentally prioritize the wrong projects. Your job is to consistently ensure everyone is clear on what excellence looks like, how they will be measured, and how they are performing against those expectations. What else have you seen? #leadership #talent #CEO #alignment #clarity
Laura Garnett
1mo
Rebecca Price I love these three, they are spot on and I would add a few more that I have witnessed firsthand when working with Founders 1. Inability to delegate: when a CEO is too far in the weeds they aren't able to do the strategic thinking that is required to take the organization to the next level. Micro-management is also a killer to great performance so the team will lose motivation and underperform. Reversing micro-management is about changing a mindset, creating new habits and ensuring you have the right team onboard. 2. Decision-making: It's easy for a Founder to get pulled in lots of directions with decision-making, trying to please their investors, executive team, co-founder and colleagues. Making hard decisions that have a huge impact can be a place where efficiency and time is lost and stress is gained. Having a Performance Expert to support a Founder in making decisions that are in alignment with their own beliefs while enabeling business growth can be a game-changer for saving time, energy and achieving their goals.
"Every problem is a people problem." Truth, truth, and more truth. I'd add: failure to sit with and reflect on discomfort.
These are all excellent Rebecca Price. I'd add a lack of emotional groundedness: this includes screaming, yelling, or blaming during stressful situations, when receiving pushback, or when angry about what's been delivered. Being emotionally unregulated as a CEO creates chaos and anxiety, hindering efficient problem-solving and creating a fear of backlash among leaders. Emotional reactivity shifts the focus from addressing the root issue, to managing the CEO's emotions, and creates a leadership culture of hiding what's really going on. a CEO's role is to anchor during times of stress and chaos.
Eric Guidice
1mo
If you’re a founder looking for a recruiting playbook used by VCs to launch recruiting check out unicorntalent.com
Commenting for better reach 🤗
Jill Katz
3w
Love these Rebecca Price! I’d also add Failure to build deep, authentic relationships. I believe this is the key to a strong, productive and sustainable organization.
William Chinburg
1mo
2. 🙌
Nyala K.
3w
#3!!!!!
Mita Mallick
1mo
All 3 are 🔥
Fractional Chief Marketing/Strategy/Growth Officer & Consultant | Health & Wellness
1moGreat topic! As an advisor to CEOs, I think about this… a lot. With all due respect for the most challenging role in an enterprise, I’ll add three more: 4. Lack of trust in team experts. There’s no CEO on the planet who has deep expertise in all business functions. In addition to getting the right folks on the bus, exceptional CEOs resource them, endorse their autonomy and judgment, actively listen, and defer when necessary. 5. An over-emphasis on consensus-building. In addition to creating alignment, exceptional CEOs know that they will need to make hard and fast authoritative decisions, often in the face of healthy disagreement, and then communicate, uphold, and enforce those decisions, even when it feels unpopular. 6. Indifference to strategic planning and constant course-changing. There’s no path to success if there are no articulated goals. Same goes for too many goals without the resourcing and staffing behind them. Implementation requires properly allocated budget, people, and tools. Exceptional CEOs avoid the constant game of strategic whack-a-mole that results in burnt out staff and disappointing outcomes.