The Entrepreneurial Paradox: Growing from Entrepreneur (player) to CEO (coach)

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  • You had a world-changing vision. A hunger. You have moved mountains to turn an idea into a real business. Now that your business is taking off, how do you as the entrepreneur transition into the role of CEO?

    If you’re like many entrepreneurs, the answer is simple. You do it poorly.

    The qualities that make entrepreneurs successful at starting a company are exactly the same flaws that make them dreadful at running one: they are self-reliant, self-motivated and self-assured. The reliance on one’s self is necessary to launch a concept. But once your company has grown to a certain size, it’s simply impractical to continue to do everything yourself.

    Some entrepreneurs-turned-CEOs think that by hiring others and delegating tasks, they’ve adequately transitioned from a builder to a leader. But take a closer look. Often these leaders micromanage their employees, undermine their senior staff and drive away talent after only a few months.

    Your “I can do everything myself” mindset becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, and you end up making the job harder than if you hadn’t hired anyone in the first place. Maybe some well-meaning confidant along the way will tell you to trust your employees, but hearing that can be like sitting down to a gorgeous gourmet meal: You can see it, you can smell it and you can taste it – but you don’t know how to make it.

    The secret ingredient for turning an entrepreneur into a CEO is to make a plan. Just as you strategized how to bring a product to market or a concept to fruition, you will have to create a strategy that takes you from a self-reliant lone wolf to the leader of a trusted and supported pack.

    This sounds simple, but in my experience, entrepreneurs who have run their business for longer than a few years have a terrible time forging this path. They get accustomed to doing things their way and delegating responsibilities means loosing control, which for a founding entrepreneur is one of the most difficult feelings to embrace.  With giving up control is inevitably the feeling that your team is “doing it wrong” or “I can do it so much better”.  

    When the entire company is your responsibility, including your employee’s jobs, learning to trust your team can be an insurmountable task for many entrepreneurs.  To help create a trust strategy, consider finding a mentor that can help to guide your transition from entrepreneur to CEO and to act as a sounding board.  Also forming an outside board of directors can often be very helpful in providing more formal support for an entrepreneur during this transition. A few key people can supply invaluable boundaries and direction.

    As a serial entrepreneur, I have made this difficult transition early in my career and I found it is also helpful to enlist an executive coach, someone skilled in changing the behavior of an entrepreneur and in molding a real leader. Having a coach that is integrated into the leadership team is critical, so they can see your performance day-to-day and provide immediate and relevant feedback and assistance.  With this type of support, the transition to becoming a successful leader can be accelerated significantly.

    One approach I would caution against is the insertion of a Chief Operating Officer into the hierarchy to try to “control” a micromanaging CEO. I have seen this maneuver attempted across several industries, and it almost always fails. You can’t control a person whose aggressive drive single-handedly built a company. The COO and CEO will get so frustrated with each other that the COO will either quit or get fired.

    The desire to change behavior has to come from the CEO or it won’t happen at all. The CEO has to recognize that she can only be the coach or the player. Have you ever watched an NFL game and seen the coach run out onto the field to catch the ball? When you’re on the field, it’s difficult to see the whole game. And your players need you to see the whole game. They need the person on top with the vision to drive the business forward – not drive it into the ground with micromanaging.

    It can be a difficult transition, but not impossible. After all, the entrepreneur is a person who identifies problems and comes up with innovations that no one else could have imagined. The problem before you now is that there’s a person on top who is stymying the progress of all you have created. And that problem, as it turns out, is you.

    It is time that you, the entrepreneur, do something about it. Take advantage of the resources available to you – mentors, boards, executive coaches, and tried-and-true talent – and fashion a truly innovative new position for yourself: a CEO who does the job well.

    Originally published on Linkedin Pulse. 

     

  • David Norris

    About David Norris

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