What is the primary focus of a leadership team?
As any business scales the founder will realise sooner rather than later hopefully that the future success depends on them being able to put in place a leadership team around them. There is a point that one person running the company is neither doable or desirable.
So the underlying question is what is the specific purpose of that team if the founder is going to still be ultimately accountable for the overall business performance.
In our experience the best leadership teams have the following focus or functions.
Prevent Founder overwhelm by increasing the leadership capacity
The leadership team is needed to prevent the founder becoming overwhelmed with tasks and responsibilities as the business scales. Rather than the founder becoming the bottleneck and the business performance being negatively impacted, a fully functioning leadership team will share some of the responsibilities previously performed by the founder, so that there is increased leadership capacity to align with the increased size and complexity of the business.
Reduce the accountability of the founder
A good team will become accountable for specific areas of the business whether those are business functions such as marketing or operations or whether they are specific services that the business offers (wholesale sales,/ retail sales,digital performance, etc. By carving the business into manageable chunks the business becomes easier to operate if the leadership team are able to operate collaboratively and the founders have articulated expectations clearly.
Bring expertise
Most founders are generalists and have a good understanding of all areas of business. In contrast a leadership team will be normally made up of specialists who bring expertise in specific functional areas. This is where they can add most value over time as they become the leader/ expert in that area of the business and enable that function to perform at a higher level than when the founder was responsible for that function. For instance the Head of Finance should know more about finances than the founder. The leadership team are there to improve the understanding and performance of specific areas of the business
Challenging the status quo and the founder
The final focus for a high performing leader & leadership team is to improve the business by challenging (with care) the previous way of working and in some instances the founder themselves. They should be continually looking for better ways for the business to operate to drive business performance and profitability which will normally mean replacing previous ways of working, systems and processes with one which are future fit and more appropriate for the size of the business the company has become
So in summary leaders and leadership teams are needed to support, complement, and challenge the business founder in order to continually evolve the business and to enable it to reach its full potential
