Leadership Culture

Early Market

Early Markets are normally dominated by smaller, start up organizations or organizations that have gone through significant  internal trauma (i.e. they shuttered significant parts of prior operations to pivot toward something new). They are also defined by the need to move extremely quickly, rewarding organizations that are disciplined and remain singularly focused on a subset of customers. If you don’t have a set of principles and practices established alongside strong team players who live these principles every day, it’s time to rethink your approach.

Growth Market

Organizations that are in the middle of a Growth Market often misplace the reason behind their strong financial results. These organizations can, at worst, mistake phenomenal results as the inevitable outcome of the “power of the idea” versus sound, disciplined decision making throughout the organization. It’s important to recognize that both of these factors lead to success and are inextricably linked to one another, not in conflict. At this stage, a leadership culture should be lean and simple. It is just as critical a factor to scaling as is the product or service itself. A strong culture supports the scaling of the product, whereas solving the customer problem is still the primary reason for success of the organization.

Mature Market

Mature Markets create lethargic organizations for good reasons. That's because the incentives in this type of market reward a risk averse strategy as a market commoditizes and becomes highly fractionalized. The incentive turns from complete dominance of a market to “doing enough” to sustain regular returns over the long run. As a result, a leadership culture may experience an existential crisis at this stage of maturity. How do you continue to inspire the team when the incentive is to not rock the boat and make incremental gains in the corner of the market that the business has claimed? At this stage, you’ll find “frozen” middle management and leadership development programs that evangelize lukewarm but competent managers. The leadership culture exists in hallway posters, bright presentations, perks, and other cargo-cult activity, but is dying a slow death through daily inaction. Leadership culture must be resuscitated through deliberate bottom up and top down focus, measured through customer-related outcomes and not only through how a team feels on any given day.

Declining Market

Declining Markets offer a do-or-die path to transforming a leadership culture. In fact, this is a place where a leadership culture may be the only thing that pulls the organization through to a new market. These markets are not for the faint of heart and require focused re-dedication to both a new customer problem and a disciplined leadership culture. It is at this stage that the pretenders in the organization will likely move onto something else when presented with the extreme action that a Declining Market dictates. It can be a positive crucible to help an organization shed the weight of years of “management to stay alive”.