Tag Archives: growth

Case: The Ideal Mix of Sr. Executive Team Skills for Success

Case Background

Leaders of fast-growing, early-stage organizations operate at a fast pace. Often, the last thing there is time to do is to assess the top team’s skills and performance to determine how to prepare them for the next stage of growth.

Most team members know each other pretty well. They have a good idea about:

  • What each other is good at doing.
  • What each has contributed.
  • How each has grown.
  • What each should focus on next to improve.

However, team members rarely have the time, energy, training, or nerve to share what they know in a forthright, supportive conversation with one another.

Yet there are serious consequences to not providing feedback when it is needed most. As highlighted in the Wall Street Journal article, “How To Tell If You Are a Jerk in the Office” (C-Suite Strategies, Journal Report, Feb 23, 2015), confidential feedback for executives is important. Not only are leaders and co-workers affected adversely by dysfunctional behavior, but business performance and customer service can be damaged, often permanently, if poor behavior continues.

IntelliVen, a San Francisco-based executive development organization, uses a proprietary approach to help top leaders and their teams address executive feedback issues head-on. For example, IntelliVen worked with a fast-paced, $10M financial analytics firm serving Freddie Mac, U.S. Treasury, and Capital One among other leading financial institutions. The IntelliVen approach was used to assess the firm’s top team of senior executives relative to norms for successful organizations at a similar stage of evolution and to identify individual and team opportunities for learning.

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Key to Operating Success in a Crisis

With baby boomers entering their last stages, Private Equity invested in senior residences ahead of the certain increase in demand as an aging population would surely seek community, comfort, support, and safety from communal living. COVID-19 changed the calculus overnight. WeWork and Airbnb represent two more niches that are forever changed…as are many more.

The time-honored formula for managing operations in crisis is simple and straightforward:

  1. Shrink to the size you can afford
  2. Prepare to grow
  3. Grow
Watch this video for an explanation of how to avoid “death by a thousand cuts” and come out strong instead in a crisis!

While shrinking to size takes force of will, it can be done by just deciding to do it. Preparing to grow is harder and takes careful thought and planning.

IntelliVen is management’s guide, especially in a crisis, to maturing operations in sync with stage of venture evolution to create maximum value in minimal time. 

In this time of crisis, we want to share what we have learned with you and your team. Join us for a FREE online session. 

 

Transition Plan for CEOs

What To Do Between Your Exit and Next Position

We wrote a post about how to make a graceful exit (especially when it’s involuntary) that explored what steps to take when leaving your position. This post is the follow-up that dives into how to identify, assess, and consolidate lessons learned to find the right next job. We’ll explore three key steps to a successful transition plan for CEOs.

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How Top CEOs Manage Their Time

Time Management for Leaders and Aspiring Leaders

After reviewing the draft news release announcing my latest promotion (many years back) and offering her congratulations, our press agent exclaimed with some dismay that: “…now you’ll have even LESS time than ever!”

I remember remarking smartly in reply that she was wrong, and that I still had just as much time as I’d always had. In fact, I had the same amount of time each day that both Da Vinci and Einstein had, and that my job, same as ever, was to make the most of it! Continue reading How Top CEOs Manage Their Time

Six reasons every leader should join a peer group.

Peer group iconEvery leader stands to benefit from the opportunity to meet monthly in a professionally facilitated session with about a dozen non-competitive peers who are in similar roles, in similar organizations, and at a similar stage of evolution.

Leaders who make the one decision to join, as long as they show up, get six distinct benefits that are hard to achieve any other way:

  • Leaders can be genuinely open to input and be vulnerable, even wrong, in front of each other; no need to put on airs or skirt around the hard stuff.
  • Peers really know and understand each other, personally and professionally, and the challenges each faces in meeting associated goals; feelings of loneliness and depression are less common among participants.

Continue reading Six reasons every leader should join a peer group.