If you are experiencing any of these symptoms, you are in danger of being caught in the vicious cycle and you need to dig yourself out quickly.
Stop making up for the deficiencies of your team. Figure out what you and the organization needs. Let go of low performers and bring on strong executives who can scale with the business for the next three years. Upgrading your executive team does not have to mean recruiting solely from the outside. In some teams like engineering, integrating an external manager who is not intimately familiar with the product and doesn’t have the respect of the team can be challenging.
In this case, you may want to promote someone from within. The benefit of doing this is that when you promote someone who has been with the company for some time, they can hit the ground running and leverage their existing knowledge of the business and the team. This can also incentivize high performers to step up. You can design learning programmes for them to acquire the key skills they need to grow into managers.
Just remember that your best engineers will not necessarily be the best managers. Evaluate promotion candidates on their desire to manage, their leadership capabilities, and recruiting skills. For the other star performers who are not fit to manage, you need to create a parallel progression track so that becoming a manager is not the only way up.
Once you have amazing people in place, you can focus on your key responsibilities as a CEO — setting the vision, orchestrating the work of the teams, and paving the path for growth. Your leadership team will focus on the day-to-day management and making the machine run smoothly.
