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Leaders Letter Newsletter

Leaders Letter 190 – The Who, What, When, Why, How Of Leading Business To Success

Dear leaders, you may have noticed this week the newsletter is slightly delayed. 

Apologises, I want to be transparent, I have been working on a couple of larger consultancy projects combined with my coaching commitments and I wanted to take a few extra days to land with the usual high-quality newsletter that’s going to add value rather than just a good newsletter that I’m not happy enough with. 

Let’s dive into The Who, What, When, Why, How Of Leading Business To Success.

The Different Ways Of Working Towards Success 

Startup Approach:

  • If you have worked in a startup you would have noticed everything is often thrown together, the idea of strategy and tactics and often blended and sort of everyone’s job. 
  • On the flip side, some startups have more leadership team that says who does what and when and sometimes include “the how” you are going to do it. 
  • Startups win by hitting aggressive targets and getting a lot of buy-in from the teams not always being autonomous and democratic. 

Scaleup Approach:

  • If you have worked in a scaleup, successful businesses know how to split out who does what – when, the why is explained and the how is often left to department leads and they present to the business.
  • Scaleups win by maturing from their previous state, they mature and grow by adding in more processes and taking away the goal(s) is the only thing to hit. Scaleups fail by acting like startups with only startup employees. Sad but true.  

“The Mature Approach”:

  • In mid to large-sized businesses the exec team will say to the business what you need to do to hit a set of big goals and then the discipline leads to controlling the who, the what, the why and the how, the why is often left to the business to explain otherwise the business results will go aray. 
  • Larger companies win by what I call controlled collaboration and being hard on the goals and output but the who and how many are often most flexible. 
  • Middle managers will be critical in some mid to large-sized businesses, and completely redundant (as we have seen in layoffs from Amazon, Meta, Google and many other tech companies) in others. 

No Secret Formula? 

I have worked across the full spectrum of businesses, from small ten-person businesses to larger 5k to 15k-person businesses and there is no perfect one-size-fits-all for the who, the what, the when, the why and the how. There are ways to push the business in the right direction by understanding if it is leadership-owned or leadership-guided. 

Change Is Hard But Necessary

There are, however, businesses that just stick to how they have always done it and top-down (directions from the exec team) that went from being successful to slowly but surely status quo-based businesses that decline and then the point the fingers phase, blaming those underneath them for struggling to make bigger changes or being able to make broader changes to their tech and then hiring more sales doesn’t work and Marketing can’t squeeze another 10% out of a bad Product. 

You lose in business by staying the same and squeezing more and more out of a bad product and badly positioned products. 

This is where trust evaporates within leadership teams and rips through your business when everyone is fully aware of this situation and cannot make any meaningful change because of poor leadership decisions.  

Below is a way to consider the who, what, when, why and “the how of your company”, regardless of how you build your company goals (OKRs or an alternative) 

Leadership Flex 

Leadership is mostly won by: Adding in the right level of guard rails and adding in flex to take ownership if and where required. Flex does include layoffs (Google is spending $700m on severance this quarter alone), removing department leads and finding a blend of the two or (not in recent times) mass hiring to accelerate with market shifts and new opportunities.  

Question for today: “Is our company leadership team giving enough direction or is it providing too much?” What stage are we at and how do we empower or power up our employees to feel part of the driving force behind the business? 

This week’s focus action is to: review The Who, What, When, Why, How Of your leadership teams and proactively drive change throughout your leadership, management and up and comers to keep being successful and drive long-term growth within your business. 

Have a great week and I’ll land in your inbox next week,

Thanks,

Danny Denhard

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