Creating a High-Performance Leadership Team

Most entrepreneurs reach a point in their journey at which they run out of hours in the day and need to delegate more. One of the most important delegation tasks is creating a leadership team that shares the workload and advises the final decision maker on the big decisions for the business.

Here are the top five requirements for building a high-performance leadership team:

1.    Create an environment in which telling the truth pays off. If your advisors aren’t comfortable telling you the truth, then you’ll be making decisions based on faulty data. This never works out well.

2.    Get help in all the seven major functional areas. Small businesses often can’t afford to have a dedicated functional expert in each area, so you may need to outsource this in a fractional way for a while.

a.    Management

b.    Operations

c.    Finance

d.    Sales/Marketing

e.    Human Resources

f.     Information Technology

g.    Research and Development.

3.    Limit the group size to around seven or fewer. You want different functional expertise and different points of view, but a larger group tends to have too many communication channels going on at once. This creates redundancy and slows down the agility and efficiency of the group.

4.    Under most circumstances, don’t put a direct subordinate of a member in the leadership group. This likely will inhibit that subordinate’s willingness to tell the truth, especially giving negative feedback, because of their fear that it might embarrass their direct supervisor.  

5.    Create a regular cadence of tactical and strategic meetings with clear agendas and time constraints. Everyone who is worth their salt hates bad meetings.

Don’t be a stranger. (770) 993-1129. tdockery@TheResolveFirm.com