Operational business leaders
With ten or more staff your challenge is leading more than doing.
With less than a thousand staff you are operational. You make day to day leadership decisions such as what to develop, sell and deliver, how to organise and motivate, and who to hire, develop and fire. Indeed you develop the business plan and deliver against it.
You are responsible for balancing long term investment and short term profit, sales and marketing, operational efficiency and quality and, development and growth.
You’ll be developing and managing people, structures and teams using policies, processes and systems to deliver financial and non financial outcomes.
Accidental business leaders
You have taken on the leadership role almost by accident. You were good at your specialist discipline of sales, operations, finance ro something else and got promoted. And then promoted again and again until you reached the top of the tree where you are now!
Suddenly you found you were responsible for many activities you’ve have never done before. And everyone is turning to your for the important decisions – and holding you to account for them. The buck stops with you for pursuing the right strategy. And for engaging and enthusing everyone behind it and for making the right decisions.
Being a leader can be tough and whilst you have to display confidence externally, internally you might, occasionally, feel a bit of an imposter.
It can be lonely at the top, especially when you have to make really difficult decisions.
Being part of a MD2MD group and realising all good leaders have similar feelings and concerns is a great way to get more things more right as well as being very reassuring.
To his surprise, as he had an MBA and had always planned to lead a business, our founder discovered when he joined a business leader peer group that he was an exception amongst operational business leaders. He was only one with an MBA. He realised most of his fellow leaders were what he called Accidental Business Leaders. Click below to read his insight into them.