Lead Upwards

CHAPTER ELEVENAlignment: Set the Strategy to Get Your Team Working Toward the Same Vision and Goals

Get the strategy right and don't micromanage. An executive needs to scale herself, and here's how to do it by setting the vision.

Delegation is the transfer of true ownership of a task or set of tasks to someone else. On startup teams, we're all moving fast, and micromanagement breaks at scale.

As a startup leader, your role is to show your team the vision, so they can adopt it and create value. As you develop your leadership style, there are many frameworks to choose from. But as organizational psychologist and executive coach Dennis Adsit suggests, “having a framework—any framework—to test and see if it fits, is infinitely better than just doing ‘jump ball.' ”

HELP YOUR TEAM TO UNDERSTAND THE MISSION AND THE “WHY” BEHIND THE STRATEGY

To set the goals for your organization, you first need to know the mission you're on. For instance, if you're a SaaS sales leader, your mission is to increase revenue by growing the customer base and/or increasing customer lifetime value (LTV). Note that your mission doesn't have to be exclusive to your team; the marketing team at a SaaS company is also focused on driving revenue and the customer success team is focused on expanding customer lifetime value through delivering success. If you're a marketing leader, your mission might be to drive awareness and build thought leadership, while also increasing revenue and growing the customer ...