WMBA 6000 Week 8 Scaling Leadership Proposal Example

From Two Founders to a Four-Person Leadership Team: A Scaling Leadership Proposal for Downbeat Software, With an Organization Chart, Costs and the Conditions That Would Make It Fail

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6000: Dynamic Leadership

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

From Two Founders to a Four-Person Leadership Team: A Scaling Leadership Proposal for Downbeat Software, With an Organization Chart, Costs and the Conditions That Would Make It Fail

Executive Summary

Downbeat Software has outgrown leadership by its two founders alone. This proposal creates a four-person leadership team, the chief executive, the chief operating officer, a new engineering manager promoted from within and a newly hired head of customer success, adopts the delegation charter drafted in Week 7 and adds a quarterly credibility review. The added cost is about $230,000 in the first year, which the proposal argues is small relative to the revenue already lost to slow decisions and departures. The company is a composite, and all figures are illustrative.

Diagnosis

Week 1 placed Downbeat at the end of the first growth phase in Greiner (1997): the founders' informal, hands-on style no longer reaches a company of 40 people, decisions queue for two people, and capable managers leave because they have responsibility without authority. Later weeks added evidence.

The disclosure decision in Week 2 was handled well: the founders shared the lost renewal and shorter runway with all employees, with a plan, which preserved trust at a difficult moment. The followership map in Week 4 showed that the founders judge engagement by visibility in meetings, and it identified J. S., a quiet engineer with the strongest record of inviting criticism and developing others, as the best candidate for engineering manager. The Week 5 outage exposed slow meaning making: five hours passed before customers heard anything, and the first message blamed a vendor. The credibility ledger in Week 6 found that promises are made casually and drift, with two of five broken. And the delegation charter in Week 7 showed that most of the founders' daily decisions could be made faster, and often better, by others.

The common thread is concentration. Information, decisions and communication all pass through two people, and the company's growth has made that the binding constraint. Studies of rapidly growing companies suggest that the ones that cope best put management capacity in place before the strain arrives, not after (Hambrick & Crozier, 1985). Downbeat is already behind.

The Proposal

A four-person leadership team

Table 1

Proposed Leadership Team and Responsibilities

The organization chart places all four reporting lines under the chief executive, with the engineering manager and head of customer success each leading a team of eight to twelve people.

The head of customer success is the most important new role. Two of the term's problems, the lost renewal and the outage communication, sat in the gap between sales and support, where no one owned the customer relationship after signing. Renewals and incident communication would now belong to one person.

The delegation charter

The charter from Week 7 is adopted as written, with its six-month review. It assigns eight decisions a style from Vroom and Yetton's model, delegating refunds, on-call rotation, hiring within teams and incident messages, and keeping the roadmap with the chief executive after consultation (Vroom, 2000). The founders commit in writing not to reopen delegated decisions outside the review.

A quarterly credibility review

At each quarterly question session, the founders will present the credibility ledger: every company-wide promise, its owner, its date and its status. Kouzes and Posner (2011) argue that leaders earn credibility by doing what they say they will do, and the review makes that visible. New promises made to the whole company must carry a date and an owner, or be stated as intentions.

Developing followers as well as leaders

The followership map's lesson extends beyond one promotion. Kelley (1992) argued that organizations get the followers they reward. The leadership team will review engagement using records, design documents, on-call logs and customer outcomes, not only meeting participation, and will acknowledge publicly when an employee's dissent proves right, starting with M. K.'s architecture warning.

Costs

Table 2

First-Year Cost Estimate

Figures are illustrative; the COO's change of role carries no added salary cost.

Against a twelve-month runway, $230,000 is significant, and it must be justified against every other use of the cash that remains. The proposal funds it from the hiring pause announced in Week 2, which deferred three roles not yet posted, and from the spending review. The return is harder to measure but not hard to imagine: the lost renewal represented about 18 percent of revenue, and a single additional renewal saved by a customer success leader would cover most of the cost.

Risks and Conditions for Failure

The proposal fails if the founders keep making delegated decisions informally. Wasserman (2012) found that founders often face a trade-off between keeping control and building a larger, more valuable company, and many choose control without recognizing the cost. If either founder reopens charter decisions, the new managers will learn, as their predecessors did, that their authority is nominal. The proposal also fails if the head of customer success is hired but not given authority over incident communication, which would recreate the Week 5 problem with a new title. Finally, it depends on J. S. accepting the role; if she declines, the founders should not default to the most visible engineer but should revisit the followership evidence.

Sequence

The changes should come in order. First, the founders sign the delegation charter and announce it, so that the new roles have authority before anyone fills them. Second, J. S. is offered the engineering manager role, with coaching starting in her first month. Third, recruiting for the head of customer success begins, with the founders agreeing in advance which decisions the new hire will own. The first credibility review takes place at the next quarterly question session, so that employees see the ledger before the new team is complete.

Measures

The leadership team will report three measures quarterly: time from customer escalation to decision, first-message time during incidents and the share of company-wide promises kept on time. Targets are a decision within two business days, a first incident message within one hour and at least 90 percent of promises kept.

References

Greiner, L. E. (1997). Evolution and revolution as organizations grow. Family Business Review, 10(4), 397-409. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-6248.1997.00397.x

Hambrick, D. C., & Crozier, L. M. (1985). Stumblers and stars in the management of rapid growth. Journal of Business Venturing, 1(1), 31-45. https://doi.org/10.1016/0883-9026(85)90005-9

Kelley, R. E. (1992). The power of followership: How to create leaders people want to follow, and followers who lead themselves. Doubleday.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2011). Credibility: How leaders gain and lose it, why people demand it (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Vroom, V. H. (2000). Leadership and the decision-making process. Organizational Dynamics, 28(4), 82-94. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0090-2616(00)00003-6

Wasserman, N. (2012). The founder's dilemmas: Anticipating and avoiding the pitfalls that can sink a startup. Princeton University Press.