2.3 Like a Great Red Wine: Developing a Leadership team
Executive Summary:
• Establishing a leadership team will gradually permit the business owner to move up “onto the business” and gain more time to think and strategise.
• It is important for every member to have a distinct role and a reason for being in the team, no passengers, only drivers.
• The leadership team should feature diversity in personality, business skills, gender and ethnicity.
• A weekly communications meeting can be effective and a quarterly or semi-annual offsite to reset and align is paramount.
• Technically, each leader is expected to wear a different hat when they are in the leadership forum.
Being able to select a young red wine full of tannins and fruit and predict its greatness in 10 + years hence is an art. To the uninitiated, the wine could be almost undrinkable. However, to a trained and experienced wine drinker a relatively easy thing to accomplish.
Similarly, choosing your leadership team members from existing managers and staff is an art. The experience will make you better, but at first, there will be missteps. We all know that many great individual contributors cannot make the step up to management. In the same way, many managers cannot make the step up to be leaders.