Building leadership teams in early stage of companies

For founders, often scaling a company is akin to raising a baby. Especially in the early days, they prefer to have a say in every small detail of how the company operates. However, like everyone else, founders have only 24 hours in a day. After a certain point, they must create leverage and learn to delegate well. Senior talent with strong professional experience can act as a force multiplier and unlock scale.

Why bring on senior talent in the early stages??

Here are a few ways in which we’ve seen senior talent benefit early-stage companies:

1. Culture: Hiring the right people early on helps create a culture of excellence and performance, which is helpful in attracting further talent needed for growth.
2. Data-driven growth: Senior talent will typically be grounded in data for their decision-making and often challenge the status quo to improve overall performance.?
3. Generalist skill set: We usually recommend hiring CXOs with backgrounds in top-tier consulting firms, so they tend to bring a generalist’s fresh analytical perspective and strong business judgment.
4. Bandwidth management: High-caliber senior talent can free up founder bandwidth and speed up processes for various initiatives.

What typically motivates senior talent to join early-stage companies??

Typically senior talent working in scale organizations will be excited to be part of your journey for multiple reasons including:

1. Being part of the future: Startups often operate at the frontiers of innovation – be product, market, or model innovation. The white spaces they operate in can be the Wild West. Senior talent often wants to be part of this promised future, especially after spending a few years in settled roles at scale organizations.
2. Fast-paced culture: Large corporates where organizational complexity necessitates long-drawn approval processes can slow down execution. Startups with a much faster paced work culture for decision making and execution can be a welcome change.
3. Above normal financial upside: Senior talent often looks in the early stages to create accelerated wealth instead of the usual corporate compensation growth.?

How to setup senior hires up for success??

As with any new role, it must be designed for success. For senior leadership roles, this becomes more important, as it can have significant organizational impact.

1. Think ahead: Finding, evaluating, hiring, and ramping up senior talent can easily be a 6-to-9-month cycle. Founders need to think through what their org will look like in a year and hire for that future. We often see founders rush to hire only once they see a role as an emergency.
2. Set clear expectations: Though senior hires might get hired with conventional titles such as COO, CMO, etc. what role they play will highly depend on the stage of the company and its near-term goals. It will also evolve with time. Sometimes, they’ll be required to wear multiple hats. Founders need to closely align with the senior team regarding what tangible KPIs as well as mindsets are expected of them.
3. Delegate not just responsibility but also authority: Founders typically have a veto on decision-making and often prefer to be in control of important tasks. Given the founders’ limited time, this can become a potential bottleneck for scale. Hence, there is a need to empower senior talent by delegating responsibilities and granting substantial decision-making authority.?
4. Provide frequent feedback: In our experience, the largest source of friction between senior execs and founders is a lack of alignment on “good” performance. Founders must have ongoing conversations with executives, even more so when the founders feel that the executive is falling short of expectations from the role. Typically, founders try to avoid uncomfortable conversations that could create short-term discord in the close-knit executive team, but this only harms the company in the long run.

?Let us know your thoughts on how senior talent can add value to the early stages.?