ONE DAY CEO

Turning teammates into leaders by making them one day CEO of regrob

Our efforts to evolve leaders from team mates – organizational trial and effects.

The main focus of these efforts in regrob are –

a) Tap into the strategic and entrepreneurial ideas of team members.

b) See the company from all view points and improve it from these aspects

c) Develop leadership capabilities of team and evolve future entrepreneurs-in-residence

As a bootstrapped company you need to be really innovative for taking your company to next level. Well, thinking out of the box is the new fad, every startup envisages and implements so many ideas. While some of these ideas will work and some may not. Most important focus is on innovation coming from all members along with a clear vision.

In a culture of such innovations we are trying an exercise of making our team members the CEO for one day. It must look weird to many of you reading this article, but this has worked for regrob unlocking many potential feedback from inside the system.

Reflections of a startup guy – Before coming up with my startup I worked with India’s most reputed firms. The company’s business policies were good and I had ideas to improve the effectiveness but I couldn’t share them with top management. So it was actually my passion to improve company from various eyes which seeded the idea of One Day CEO in regrob. In this exercise we are making each of our team members CEO for a single day. Since we have more than 60 commandos, we get 60 great insights to run the company in better ways.

This is proving to be one of the turning points for regrob as it is helping us in creating robust business model and plugging the loopholes. Initially the organization was reluctant to try this out but later on everybody thought to try it out. It is proving to be a good health checkup for regrob.

I am now sharing how I conducted this activity:

Every fortnight one team member is given an opportunity to take position of CEO by taking all responsibility to run company. It includes the following points:

Dos of One day CEO

1) Reviewing all strategic and Tactical decisions of company.

2) What all changes to execute in company (Feedback)

3) All other team members are made to answer his/her questions (including the founders)

Results:

1) Implemented entrepreneurial and robust culture in organization where every team member know the direction

2) Company effectiveness has increased and relationships have improved.

3) Added new responsibility and refined existing responsibility of all team members

4) Customer acquisition and retention increased by 50 percent

5) Plugged many loop holes in resource management 

6) All grievances of team members sorted out in quick manner 

7) We got to see new perspectives for running business

8) A pride for all the team members which helped them to use their leadership skills

This activity is a huge success within 30 days of start which could have taken years and cash burn for the company.

Now I must say that the activity looks demanding from a traditional approach as one has to keep aside their ego. We are executing more than 10 ideas and seeing them adding value to business. I think none of the management books can teach these lessons.

I am a firm believer in the concept of risk beyond capacity because we have limited life to bring change. You do not always need cash burn activities or big technology to bring disruption, if you have capable team then you can make anything a success.

Mind blowiiiiiiiiiiiiing Results for regrob!

What do you people think about our initiative?

You may write to me at [email protected] or send us your comments. Your expert comments will be valuable for our startup and its culture.