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Step One: Shift Your Thinking

The most common issue in scaling a top team is a person-centric mindset, instead of a role-centric mindset.

Founders often design their leadership structures around the people they have, rather than the functions the business needs fulfilled. This is a critical error.

When businesses grow and evolve, strategies change, and the organisation required to deliver also changes. It goes without saying, not everybody that was a good fit for the previous lifecycle stage, company size and organisation structure will be a great fit in the season ahead. Leaders that thrive in early stage startups are great hustlers, they lead from the trenches with hands very dirty. As the organisation scales, leaders need to design and build scalable structures, teams, systems, elevate their level of management (from supervisory, to managerial, to executive), manage more complex teams, multitask between long-term strategic thinking, project leadership, and hands-on execution in real time, and execute in an ever more complex environment. Not everyone can make the many leaps needed.

“You don’t build a business. You build a team, and the team builds the business.” – Zig Ziglar

Shift your thinking from being person-centric, to being role centric. Design the organisation needed to execute on the strategy. Define each leadership role: what sort of person is needed to thrive and execute well?

Step Two: A-Team Assessment

Often you know which leadership team members are killing it and will scale in their roles, and which will not. If you are not sure, conduct an A-Team assessment.

This isn’t about judging personalities—it’s about understanding the fit of experience and capability to the requirement of company leadership roles going forward.

  1. Assess holistically. Evaluate ‘A-playerness’, level of leadership aptitude (use something like a Cognitive Process Profiling assessment), competencies relative to role requirements, culture fit, and goals fit. See the free A-Team assessment tool on Artofscale.io/Tools.
  2. Categorise roles. For each role in your leadership team structure, determine if the person in the role is: a scalable A-Player; not scalable but still an A-Player right now; not able to perform. In the latter case, is the gap urgent to resolve or manageable for now?
  3. Be brave: Here’s where the emotional heavy lifting begins. Remember, it’s a tough fact of life that high contributors in a young startup often land up being a poor fit when the company scales. It’s true of leaders too. It’s just how things go. Face it head on with sensitivity, courage, and clarity. Support from a seasoned scale up coach can help bring objectivity and courage to this process. Reach out if we can help.

Step Three: Hire A-Players

Transitioning misaligned or underperforming leaders out of critical roles is challenging, but avoiding it will only delay, compound, and magnify inevitable issues. All the seasoned scale up leaders we’ve spoken to arrive at the same conclusion: the earlier you address role-fit problems, the better, for everyone concerned.

  1. Prioritise: List the sequence in which you need to tackle the roles
  2. Define your timeline. Define how long you have to effect a successful change. Faster is better, but spacing leadership team changes is also important
  3. Communicate openly. While it’s difficult, have honest conversations with your team about the need for changes. Transparency builds trust, even in tough moments.
  4. Leverage your network. For top leadership roles in particular, hire through professional networks, to find candidates who come with trusted endorsements from known A-Players who have worked side-by-side with them. See our blog with top hiring tips, and chapter 12 of the Art of Scale book for more practical insights and tools.

Courage to Lead

Scaling a business is emotionally tough. You’ll face moments of self-doubt, difficult conversations, and decisions that test your values. But your ability to get this right—to assemble the leadership team that can scale with your vision—will determine the difference between frenzied survival and thriving.

Make the hard calls now. Your future self will thank you.

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