Personalities of a good leadership team

Corbett | October 11, 2010 10:15 PM

Reading a recent NYT interview of Paul Maritz, president and C.E.O. of the software firm VMware, I was left thinking how many teams actually have all these attributes. It's very difficult for a company in such a fast moving market like China to fill out the team correctly, putting even more stress on the bottom line.

Very interesting insights, and something worth thinking about when looking at staff and yourself.

"At the risk of oversimplifying, I think that in any great leadership team, you find at least four personalities, and you never find all four of those personalities in a single person.

You need to have somebody who is a strategist or visionary, who sets the goals for where the organization needs to go.

You need to have somebody who is the classic manager -- somebody who takes care of the organization, in terms of making sure that everybody knows what they need to do and making sure that tasks are broken up into manageable actions and how they're going to be measured.

You need a champion for the customer, because you are trying to translate your product into something that customers are going to pay for. So it's important to have somebody who empathizes and understands how customers will see it. I've seen many endeavors fail because people weren't able to connect the strategy to the way the customers would see the issue.

Then, lastly, you need the enforcer. You need somebody who says: "We've stared at this issue long enough. We're not going to stare at it anymore. We're going to do something about it. We're going to make a decision. We're going to deal with whatever conflict we have."

You very rarely find more than two of those personalities in one person. I've never seen it. And really great teams are where you have a group of people who provide those functions and who respect each other and, equally importantly, both know who they are and who they are not. Often, I've seen people get into trouble when they think they're the strategist and they're not, or they think they're the decision maker and they're not."

Category: Cool Links

Comments (1)

Comments

---

Tan Yinglan

October 12, 2010 6:08 PM

Great article and really hits close to home. I love articles like this - good job of producing a nice inspiring post.

A good entrepreneurial team is multi-faceted and it is rare that the founder has all the attributes. Hence they need to recruit, and often partner with a VC

The role of the venture capitalist is to partner the entrepreneur in the journey. Despite frequent misconceptions that make it seem more hostile. The start-up ecosystem has been termed a zoo (or in certain geographies, a jungle) where vulture capitalists pounce on innocent entrepreneurs as their hapless prey. By and large, however, a star VC can provide the missing expertise a start-up needs for winning the marathon. The best VCs don't just hand over cash; they help the companies in their portfolio plan and pace themselves like marathon runners, and they also help the companies make sound decisions and build teamwork, and they tap their own networks to strengthen each entrepreneur's team.

For the entrepreneur, I also recommend this system to ensure that there is cash in the bank : http://tinyurl.com/FinancingSystem

Tan Yinglan

The Way Of The VC - Top Venture Capitalists On Your Board (Amazon: http://www.tinyurl.com/wayofthevc)
Read more at: http://www.wayofthevc.com
Follow me on http://www.twitter.com/yinglantan

---

Add a comment

---

---

Name

Email Address

URL

Remember personal info?

Comments

Captcha:

Type the characters you see in the picture above.