A management team is not just the collection of the top leaders. It is a group that works together to make the company successful. A great CEO knows how to empower the management team.

At the beginning a startup company is a bunch of passionate people, who get together to get stuff done. Commonly, there is no CEO and no formal organization in the beginning. As the startup grows, it needs a CEO and a management team.

Purposes of a management team:

• Each member has two hats: that of a member of the management team, and a leader of their team or business.
• Members support and challenge one another.
• The CEO uses the help of the management team to get stuff done so that they do not end up trying to do everything themselves.
• The team works continuously on the company strategy, preparing proposals for the board of directors.

The purpose of management is to make individual weaknesses irrelevant. This is the power of an excellent management team.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Many start ups start as a bunch of passionate people, who get stuff done together.

If you’re the CEO of such a start up, it’s vital that you build your management team. That you see it as a special task to develop the team, because the management team is not just a collection of the key people of the company.

The management team is a core part of the business and of the organization and of the success of the business. So you must take special care and spend special time on building the management team, grooming it, making sure that it works well.

Anybody who is a member of a management team has two hats.

You’re a member of the management team and you are there to make the company successful. So you have an overall responsibility for the success of the company. That’s your one hat.

The other hat is the responsibility for the team or the business that you are hired to run.

But you have those two hats and, as a manager, you must think about what’s best for the company, not just what’s best for your own team, and in the management team, you work together to solve problems and create the strategy.

That’s the second thing, the strategy that the company creates. The work is lead by the CEO. It is the management team that is in a continuous strategic discussion and process to build out and improve the strategy, take it to the Board of Directors for approval.

It is taken there by the CEO and the CEO works on the strategy with the management team.

If you don’t treat the management team as a team, you will not have a good strategy. You need to get the input from everybody. Everybody needs to put their best foot forward to jointly produce a winning strategy.

Another purpose of the management team is for the various team members of the management team to support each other.

They can challenge each other, they can question each other, they support each other, directly help each other. Their role is not just to achieve their own goals, but to make sure that the goals of their colleagues are achieved as well.

Peter Drucker said it wisely when he said that the purpose of management is to make individual weaknesses irrelevant.

The clue here is that in a management team, you have a variety of people with different skill sets, different profiles, they have different strengths and weaknesses.

By working together, you can make all those weaknesses irrelevant and you can enhance the strengths of the individuals and of the team.