FIVE ESSENTIAL ROLES TO BUILD A LEADERSHIP TEAM

When social entrepreneurs understand their strengths and priorities, and develop a leadership team composed of people with disparate and complementary skills, it creates “the perfect combination.”

According to Chantal Laurie Below and Kimberly Dasher Tripp, from Stanford University, there are five essential leadership roles in an organization that is ready to scale up. These roles may or may not be filled by five separate people; in some cases multiple roles can be filled by one person. The five roles are the evangelist, scaling partner, connector, program strategist, and realist. 

THE PROBLEM TO SOLVE PROBLEMS

Every decision involves problem solving. However, our problem-solving ability in management is so limited because our models of problem-solving are devoid of people while actual problem-solving isn’t.

Executive managers can be extremely well educated with many years of experience; they may also be successful managers who have accomplished great things - but frequently their ability to solve a problem is severely limited. That sounds like a paradox, but people cannot define the problem they are trying to solve.

Every decision involves problem solving. In some cases we employ professionals who do that job - they’re called project managers and administrators and so on. They are certainly a part of that process, but what happens when you have to anticipate an issue or when you don’t have an established process or routine to deal with it? You have to define the issue before you can pick a routine to address it.