COMMON CEO CHALLENGES AMID GROWTH AND THE BEST SOLUTION POSSIBLE

Key executives need a leadership growth spurt to keep up with company expansion and adapt to change.

Reservoir Advisors works with CEOs and senior executives who lead high-growth companies. Often backed by private equity investors, these companies can double in size over the course of a year, and the senior executives need to keep up.

One of the main reasons these companies get funded is because investors believe in the CEO and the leadership team. If even one key executive struggles during a season of high growth, however, the company’s strength and business results can be severely compromised.

Common CEO and senior executive challenges amid high growth include:

  • Hiring, retaining, and growing leaders who need to adapt to changing conditions and new demands

  • Ensuring everyone in the organization is clear on the company’s mission, vision, values and yearly business objectives, so that everyone is working towards the same end and downstream leaders are empowered and expected to take initiative within these parameters

  • Ensuring the company hits revenue and profitability targets while simultaneously cultivating a strategic mindset and an evolved leadership approach

  • Minimizing functional silos and interpersonal dysfunction

  • Operating proactively, on offense, from conviction, and in strength vs. operating reactively, on defense, from fear, and in weakness.

  • Empowering leaders to own and make decisions quickly without the CEO’s constant attention—problem solving cross-functionally while preserving high expectations and meeting deadlines

  • Navigating new territory wisely and making hard decisions quickly while learning on the fly

  • Preserving mental, emotional, physical and familial health while working tirelessly, traveling, and carrying the weight of countless competing demands

Processing these and other issues can be challenging for a senior leader, especially because it is often difficult to appear vulnerable, uncertain, fearful, angry, messy, or otherwise incompetent in front of the board and other leaders. Senior-level issues also tend to be confidential, complex, and predictably persistent, so sharing with friends and family is generally an inappropriate, insufficient, and unsystematic solution.

We believe—and numerous data points confer—that investing in a qualified executive coach yields the highest ROI for CEOs and executive leaders during periods of high growth. Given the financial and human impact of senior executive decisions, all it takes is one misstep to cause debilitating issues, blow up an important transaction, compromise excellence, generate bad press, cripple trust, or prompt an undesirable resignation. Leaders under such pressure feel constantly overwhelmed and are at risk at crumbling without adequate support—as superhuman as CEOs feel, they remain human and everyone has a breaking point.

If you are a CEO who identifies with any of what we’ve outlined above, we welcome a conversation to discuss how we can help.