Services - Success Stories

A CEO Striving to Lead the Organization to the Next Stage of Growth

The Situation

The CEO and Board of an emerging software company wished to lead their organization beyond the initial growth phase following their recent successful IPO. They engaged us to assist them in assessing the firm's leadership needs for a growth phase of the business.

What We Did

We conducted a comprehensive organizational assessment and leadership profile of the CEO. This process identified opportunities and potential barriers to a successful transition to a new phase of business growth, while also revealing the leader's current strengths and challenges. Our assessment revealed:

• The CEO was globally acclaimed as a visionary, strategic leader; he was admired for his strong sense of ethics and demonstrated integrity.
• His strong external focus and understanding of customers, competitive threats and opportunities, and stakeholder interests and concerns had been key contributors to the organization's significant sales and profits to date.
• He was respected for his ability to create a climate of high performance and accountability; his empowerment of others had been a leading factor in creating the conditions that allowed him and others to achieve goals beyond their expectations.
• However, the CEO, in his eagerness to take decisive action, did not always take time to outline his thinking, provide a context for his decisions, or listen fully to the concerns and interests of others; in meetings he often talked "off the cuff," with little advance preparation; as a result, the Board and senior leaders were not able to align fully, and their input and experience were often overlooked, resulting in delayed buy-in, less effective decisions, and, at times, costly mistakes.
• It became apparent that the CEO's style as a "textbook" entrepreneur - decisiveness, ability to take action in spite of incomplete information, high energy, strategic thinking - needed to shift to scale up the organization for sustainable growth.

The Results

The CEO and the organization took decisive action in several ways:

• Through a year of individual coaching, the CEO committed himself to coaching and developing his next-level leaders more visibly and consistently; he adopted a more consultative, substantive dialogue approach in meetings that elicited the thinking of others.
• Although he had no imminent plans to leave, the CEO recognized that he had to prepare others to help lead the organization through its next phase of business - establishing the strategy, structure, and roles for scalable, sustainable growth; he launched a CEO succession planning process.
• The CEO "stepped up to the plate" in his relationship with the Board; he took a more assertive stand with the Board, sharing more of his thinking and providing the broader context for his decisions; he consistently took a strong stand for his team; over time, with the Board's assistance, clearer roles and boundaries were set on which decisions would be made by management vs. the Board, with an almost immediate positive impact on results.

The Outcome

Within a year, the CEO and his executive team successfully integrated several acquired companies, achieving integration results beyond their initial expectations showing that the current team had successfully navigated the challenge of scaling their leadership to fit their rapidly growing organization; as our work was concluding, the executive team was creating a plan to coach/develop next-level leaders and devise a more formal succession plan for the top levels of management.

To obtain these results see our CEO Coaching Services.