Operational Business Leaders
We use the term MD2MD to illustrate that the essence of your membership is your relationships with peers. Engaging with other leaders like you Managing Director to Managing Director. (MD to MD)
Our community is interestingly diverse with members based internationally and across different sectors. We use the term Managing Director but actually your role may very well be Chief Executive, Executive Chairman, Senior Partner or Managing Partner. What is critical is that you are the operational leader of a business or business like unit. We welcome members from the third and public sectors too. Some people with other titles such as General Manager or Chief Operating Officer may qualify too. The key thing for being a suitable member of MD2MD is that you are an operation leader.
You are operational if it is your role to develop the business plan and then deliver against it. In planning you’ll be balancing long term investment and short term profit, sales and marketing, operational efficiency and quality and, development and growth. In delivering against the plan you’ll be developing and managing people, structures and teams using policies, processes and systems to deliver financial and non financial outcomes.
This probably means you lead tens or hundreds of staff as if you have more staff than that your role is probably as a strategic leader who employs Managing Directors to do the practical stuff of running the individual business units.
You are the Leader if your challenge is more about getting others to do things than it is about getting things done. Indeed, making that transition is itself a key challenge for many who join MD2MD. You probably gained your first leadership role because you were good at deciding and doing. Many like you join MD2MD when they realise that making that personal transition to leadership is critical to sustaining growth as the business scales. Businesses often plateau when there are too many people and processes for the leader to get things done simply by being good at deciding and doing themselves.
This probably means you lead tens or hundreds of staff as if you have less than ten staff you probably spend most of your time doing: developing, selling and delivering.
