My Coaching Approach
Just when you think you have it all figured out—found product-market fit, hired the right people, raised rounds of VC dollars and built a GTM playbook—you have to do it all over again, and again. Cycle after cycle, that’s how scaling works. All of this depends on leadership ability. Leaders must scale alongside the company.
What does it actually mean for a leader to scale?
In order to build a company that achieves outlier success, leaders need to thrive stage after stage. The best leaders I’ve seen and trained in my career, who scaled along with the company and remained in their roles through IPO, invested in their performance on three dimensions: individually, with the team, and for the company as a whole. These are the dimensions along which I train leaders to scale, along with the related skills I will help you develop to increase your odds of building an outlier company.
3 Pillars of Outlier Leadership
Individual Authenticity
On the individual level, great leaders are on a constant journey to get increasingly clear about their core leadership values. They draw strength and resilience from their unique experiences and values, which also serve as foundations from which they inspire others and drive an enduring team culture.
-
Identifying and codifying your core leadership principles
-
Understanding your leadership superpowers (and their shadows) and how to “weaponize” them
-
Developing leadership styles for different settings that uniquely fits and works for you
-
Identifying annual leadership development goals to drive company performance
Team Alignment
On the team level, great leaders not only hire the best talent, they also organize and empower diverse teams to collaborate effortlessly and to innovate fearlessly. In doing so, the team is truly greater than the sum of the parts.
-
Designing an organizational structure, internal processes and incentive system built for each stage of scale
-
Identifying the right hiring profile for key leadership hires and assessing experienced talent for competencies
-
Developing internal systems to ensure collaboration across teams such as Revenue and Product
-
Building an effective board, managing communications and ensuring healthy board dynamics
-
Building a diverse team and inclusive company culture to attract top, loyal talent
Company Strategy
On the organizational level, great leaders make the right strategic decisions despite having imperfect data and information. Making the optimal judgment calls about the market timing, competitive differentiation, target market segmentation and international expansion can often determine whether a company will have an outlier vs. average outcome.
-
Developing a comprehensive, company-wide competitive strategy and clear market positioning
-
Building an integrated annual planning process to align all teams in the company
-
Identifying ideal customer profiles and executing segmentation strategy at scale
-
Prioritizing and identification of international markets for expansion