Newsletter #53 : Management Challenges, inc. The CEO

Jason
February 15, 2021
Hey EveryoneHope you’ve had a great week.Welcome back to The 5 Minute Tech Break where we reflect on management challenges from the perspective of the relatively new CTO plus, managing that sometimes tricky relationship with the CEO.Alongside that we have news of our latest batch of lectures.Big plans in store for CTO Academy during 2020 and that includes an ever increasing range and breadth of management skills lectures and course material.If you have a particular topic you’d like us to cover, we’d love to hear from you.Happy weekend.Apira Giriharan
Marketing Manager
[email protected]
 Challenges Faced By New CTOsWe work with a lot of CTOs around the world still finding their feet in the role and grappling with that leap from team player to tech leader.This feedback from one mentee is not untypical … “as a new CTO I struggled with the jump from dev to management, especially at a time of growth and change at my company. It wasn’t always clear what that change needed to look like”So one of our recent blog posts (“5 Management Challenges“) looked at some of the consistent management challenges we hear about from new (and not so new) CTOs.______________________________________________________________________
 Managing the CEO : CTO Dynamic aka … Managing the one at CTO AcademyYou couldn’t get more diverse characters than our co-founders Jason and Andrew who, dare I say, are typical of the personalities you often find working in these respective roles.So how do they manage their own working dynamic and contrasting styles?We conducted a Q&A with both of them and discovered unusual harmony between the two (at least that’s the official version!)__________________________________________________
 Leaders Need Different Skills To Survive In TechInteresting article from the HBR.“The unique nature of the tech world doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. What can change—and quickly—is a leader’s ability to manage the idiosyncratic challenges that come with the territory. Together, these recommendations will equip leaders to excel in a world that outpaces even the best and brightest. Leaders who build the norms of dialogue and accountability create organizations that are substantially more likely to thrive in the long term”________________________________________________________________________
 Don’t overlook the middle managersWe’ve talked this week about managing the CEO but skilled leadership involves managing all key players and none more so, than the middle managers.We didn’t want to leave them out of our management review and found an article from Entrepreneur that starts to analyse important elements of those particular relationships.We will be devoting more time to team management and we drill much deeper into all of these topics in some of our course material.________________________________________________________________________
 Example Of Recent CTO Academy LecturesOne topic about which we’ve had multiple requests to cover and that’s the sometimes uncomfortable discipline of selling.For this reason we launched this month first of what will be a series of lectures covering various aspects of the sales process. List of the most recent lectures on CTO Academy [course title in brackets]Introduction to Selling [Commercial]Selling and the Importance of Trust [Commercial]Business Valuations [Commercial]How To Raise Seed Capital [Start Ups / Funding]Importance of Blog Writing for Tech Leaders [Personal Dev]Team Building [Leadership]Handling Interviews [Personal Dev]Qualities of an Effective Customer Service Team [Commercial]NB : The business Valuations lecture (and earlier lecture that covered Valuation Spectrum) talks about the need to be prepared to exit at anytime, because you never know when a strategic buyer and a premium offer, might come knocking on your door.  As an example, article in 2018 showed that PayPal allocate $3bn pa to an acquisition war chest. You definitely want to have your business “exit ready” when PayPal come knocking on your door. WANT TO SIGN UP TO CTO ACADEMY?Get access to all of our course material from just $49. More information here.________________________________________________________________________
 Book of the week … The Start Up CEOGoing back a few years now but if you’re interested in the life of a Start Up CEO (perhaps you’re in that role yourself) then “Start Up CEO : A Field Guide To Scaling Up Your Business” might be the one for you …. ________________________________________________________________________
 Quote of the week“Practice the golden rule No.1 of management in everything you do.
Manage others the way you would like to be managed”– Brian Tracy

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