Stay in Control and Keep Growing – Advice to Young Professionals

Tom is an entrepreneur, and serves as a CEO of his start up which employs 6 people. He is supremely intelligent, passionate about his ideas and equally hard working. It has been a year that he started off and the company has started seeing positive cash flows, however Tom is not happy! His personal life has gone for a toss, his employees do not listen to him, he ends up doing more work than any other employee at his start up (which is obvious as he is owner) and at the end he is confused about the vision of the company and next steps for his life too!

Harry is a project manager at a growing firm which gives him lot of opportunities to experiment and grow professionally. He is a very hard working manager, ambitious, extremely dependable and hard working asset of the company, highly creative, and sought after by seniors for any work (which is obvious as he is the hard worker and wants to grow). He has seen good growth in early stages of his career despite of which he is not happy! His team members respect him but it is very difficult to get work from them, he ends up doing much of the work and corrections (which is obvious as he is ambitious and heard worker), his seniors praise him for his creativity and ownership but do not give him significant further leaps because they doubt that he will be able to manage team size of more than 5-6 people or more projects. He is confused on his further career growth, skills he needs to improve, tactics to manage people, and next steps in life too!

Luckily, I have been in similar situations at some points of my professional or personal life (coz they are intertwined) and through the experience and then opportunity to work with several start ups as advisor or meeting them at the start up events, been able to find out some simple solutions to the above problems. They may not be applicable to larger organizations where the role of CEO changes further but the next step I have talked about above can be tackled by these approaches or at least the stress reduced. These may be the one of the few alternatives but I can bet you that this works!

So here it goes:

1.       Focus, Focus, and Focus! : It is a natural tendency of many of the young ambitious start up CEOs or project managers to get swayed away by numerous distractions which seems like initial opportunities to gain an extra buck or prove your mettle to your superiors. Just focus on one single task at a time and try to structure the responsibilities first.

2.       Set the Vision Straight: As a CEO, your primary job is to set the short and long term vision for the organization and keep evolving that and stand by that. It is quite obvious to find future shaky sometimes, but you as a backbone of the company must never reflect the nervousness to your employees.

3.       Setting Structure and Delegating Smartly: For you the foremost responsibility is getting the work done and providing a right framework to your team. You should set the vision right for your team members. I a third person ask any of your team members that, “what you are responsible for?”  He or she should know it and if they do not then you should realize that are not doing your job well.

4.       Do not do a job just because you can do it better than other person in your team if it is not your personal core: You are running a company and the very ethos of it is team work. Brain can think well and heart can pump better, sometimes heart takes the decision in place of brain and we know what happens then! It is good to do that only at critical junctures!

The point being that if you have someone employed for a particular role then it would be better to teach him how to do and give him structure than doing things for that person. As a CEO you have to keep yourself from daily operations and only act when absolutely necessary. Having said that do remember brain knows everything that other organs do and whether they are doing it well or not

5.       Bring in Positive environment: As a leader it is also very important to rise above daily gossips, cross talks, and flowing negativity. Remember you have to become one, if not already, who should be looking up by all the employees to gain some positive energy. This will keep you happy and respected and your employees feel in safe hands

6.       Cash Flows/Project Flows: Though at a larger system P&L will be taken care by other senior staff but at this stage you should focus on maintain positive inflow of cash/project and also keep your team aware of real circumstances, so that they do not hesitate to put in that extra bit whenever required!

7.       Take Care: Please take care of your health and also your personal life and family. I am a strong believer that personal and professional lives always go together and jeopardy in any of these can significantly damage the other. So take Care! And change the world with your ideas!