Your Next Stage of Growth May Require a Different Kind of Leadership
Build On What Made You Successful to Create What Comes Next
What got you here may not get you there. But that doesn't mean abandoning the qualities that made your company successful. The challenge is to understand those qualities well enough to apply them to your next stage of growth.
David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva developed Appreciative Inquiry at Case Western Reserve University in the 1980s. Their approach emphasizes discovering what works well in an organization and using those strengths as a foundation for positive change. Applied to business growth, this means identifying the values, capabilities, relationships, and entrepreneurial spirit that distinguish your company—and exploring how those strengths can be leveraged to create its future.
As a company grows, however, its leadership requirements evolve. Entrepreneurial instincts, personal relationships, and informal decision-making may have served the company well, but increasing complexity can require greater delegation, more disciplined processes, and stronger organizational capabilities. Leaders may need to spend less time solving immediate problems and more time developing people, enabling others to execute, and creating tomorrow's business.
The answer isn't necessarily more management. It may be different leadership responsibilities and complementary talent.
Leaders who excel at growing today's business may not be the same people who can discover and create tomorrow's. Future growth may require leaders who recognize emerging customer needs, connect seemingly unrelated developments, and identify possibilities for new products, markets, partnerships, and processes. They build relationships with complementary organizations, develop market makers who can open doors to new customers and markets, and turn promising ideas into viable business initiatives.
These leaders do more than manage initiatives already identified by others. They explore unfamiliar territory, test assumptions, validate business propositions, mobilize resources, and pave the way into markets the company might otherwise never enter. They combine imagination with the practical ability to make new possibilities real.
This doesn't mean replacing successful leaders or abandoning the company's DNA. It means understanding which strengths should endure, how they can be applied in new ways, and where additional leadership capabilities are needed. Sometimes existing leaders can develop those capabilities. Sometimes the company needs to complement them with people whose experience, instincts, and skills fill important gaps.
Growing today's business and creating tomorrow's business are both essential, but they may require different leadership behaviors and expertise. The CEO's responsibility is to ensure the leadership team collectively can do both—preserving what makes the company successful while building the capabilities required for its future.
The question isn't whether your company must abandon what made it successful. It's whether your leadership team can build on those strengths, discover new possibilities, and turn them into the company's next stage of growth.
