Читать книгу Lead Upwards - Sarah E. Brown - Страница 24

Executive coach John Rex was a CFO at Microsoft prior to transitioning to a startup and now coaches leaders of all company sizes. He notes that it's a common challenge for scaling startups to help their “big company” leaders adapt and thrive.

“Many people are ideally suited, not to thrive and do a great job at a startup, but a big company,” says Rex.

In large companies, you're incentivized to hone skills primarily around decision‐making without much execution, often in markets that are already established.

“The skill that you really develop is how to decide what's important because there's so much information flowing toward you, so many requests for your time,” says Rex. “You get really good at sifting through large volumes of incoming information. That isn't your remit at a startup that's disrupting a new market,” says Rex.

Leaders coming from larger companies can underestimate the impact of having less structure and fewer resources, which was something Rex himself struggled with coming from Microsoft to a smaller startup.

“I really didn't appreciate the magnitude of how different those cultures are,” says Rex. “For founders I coach, I now tell them, you want to be super careful when you hire big company executives because they just don't know what they don't know. They are used to being very successful but it's in a particular context of success. What is required for success in a startup environment is very different from what's required for success in a large corporation.”

“At a big company, I spent most of my time in email and meetings because that's how I processed the vast amount of information that flowed toward me. At a startup, I had to return to practicing skills that I had come to delegate to more junior people in my corporate days,” says Rex.

Leveling down isn't about lack of willingness or a “holier than thou” attitude. Rather, many big company leaders just haven't done it for a long time.