During Season 1 of The Daily Bolster, Matt and Sarah Brown shared insights on the nuances of non-linear career progression, strategies for transitioning between roles, and the art of leaving a company gracefully.
You won’t always have a ton of time to engage with the Chief People Officer, so you should know how to capitalize on your interactions with these executives.
We can learn a lot about success and growth just by looking at the history of entrepreneurship. Brad Feld and Matt Blumberg discuss what’s changed in the startup world.
If you have a Chief People Officer who is transactional, doesn’t speak up, and has morale or turnover issues within their own team, you’ll need to address it quickly.
A great Chief People Officer is strategic, courageous, and financially astute. They know they’re the role model for the company; their behavior sets the tone.
As a startup, it’s easy to focus on the tangible, tactical operations of the People team, but if you want to scale, you’ll need someone in your organization who cares deeply about your values.
Your CPO needs to be able to engage the entire company, be thinking strategically about the business, and have short- and long-term plans in place for contingencies and foreseeable roadblocks.
You can't possibly be successful in today's world if you're not learning, if you don't have a growth mentality. You’re never the smartest person in the room. The minute you’re convinced that you are… you're screwed.
One of the most productive ways to engage with your CCO is offsite and with customers. This builds a clear understanding of your customer base and their challenges.
If they don't do the work, tech CEOs will continue to bemoan the lack of diversity in their leadership ranks and miss out on the benefits of diverse leadership, while not taking ownership for those efforts stalling.
Your CCO should be looking far enough ahead to begin thinking about upcoming challenges and working to develop solutions that scale with your organization.
None of these practices is the path of least resistance, but there's something in them that leads to the competitive edge, the informed intuition, the vision, and the ability to motivate people that are common in successful founders.
The great CCOs all have the same traits: they are advocates for the customer, have a mix of quantitative and qualitative skills, and are passionate about processes that create a seamless, functioning team.
Investors are looking for viable businesses that have traction and product market fit—there’s less focus on unproven but good ideas, and more focus on paying customers and a clear path to profitability. The current market is less about FOMO and more about fundamentals.
A CCO touches nearly every part of the organization, from sales, to product, to marketing. They are a collaborator, a champion for customers, and a strategic thinker that understands consumer trends and demographics.
Whether the new year has you feeling all the anticipation of a fresh start or you’re one of the many individuals impacted by recent layoffs, it’s time to review your career goals.
Enabling executive development can be the key to retaining executives for the long term and helping them to grow with the company, rather than being out-grown by the company.
The close of the year is an opportunity to reflect—and report—on progress, learnings, and performance. Are you maximizing the value of your end-of-year reflection?
For Bolster, 2022 was a year of continued progress—supporting a growing number of clients, adding transformational executives to our on-demand marketplace, launching new tools and features, and more.
Your CMO needs the ability to create space in their day for thinking and analysis, they need to be strategic, and they need to be able to stop doing “one more thing.”
Hiring an executive is a major commitment for you and your team—you need to get it right. Short term projects can fill a specific need or determine whether an individual will be a good fit for a longer-term role.
