From Startup To Organization: How Leadership Scales Up Around Different Maturity Levels

In our interview with Nicolai Chen Nielsen, you'll get a thorough primer on the concept of organizational health, and how leaders influence the success of their companies.
Nicolai Chen Nielsen
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Toby

Leadership has a romantic image. And that is often farther from the truth than it should be.

Failing companies tend to blame failure on unforeseen, external circumstances, while success is attributed to great leadership. 

Research shows, however, that strong leadership is the most dominant lever to drive organizational success.

Now that we have established that leadership is indeed important – what does leadership actually mean?

Introduction to organizational health

Leadership is ultimately on element in the greater frame of “organizational health”.

Organizational health is the ability of an organization to align around a performance objective, achieve it, and continuously innovate along the way.

Leadership is the driver of putting effective organizational health in place.

Leadership in different stages of a company

The 3 stages of leadership often get defined as Lead Self, Lead Team, Lead Organization.

Translated to the different sized of a company, this breaks down into 4 steps: Stage 1: Cofounders do the work Stage 2: Team-based work Stage 3: Manager CEO Stage 4: Organizational leadership

The challenge for startups is often that these changes happen in very compressed timelines of 3-5 years, which means that leaders have to evolve and learn fast if they want to bring their organizations to success.

In our interview with Nicolai Chen Nielsen, you’ll get a thorough primer on the concept of organizational health, and how leaders influence the success of their companies.

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Toby

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