The CEO in need to define her company’s long-term strategy

This story is about Bronze Rooster, a CEO in need of making important decisions in terms of her company’s strategic vision and communicating effectively to her management team** . Each of Wave’s clients is known as an alias to preserve confidentiality. Each alias is granted randomly and is a coloured animal.

Bronze Rooster, a startup CEO and founder is a long-time Wave’s client. Her goals for her second coaching cycle were two-fold: she wanted to continue her ongoing work in defining and implementing her company’s long-term strategy and objectives as well as focus on easing tensions she was experiencing with other top management within her company.

At the beginning of her ride, Bronze Rooster struggled with creating a long-term vision for her company and her propensity for working in an ad-hoc manner lacked structure and foresight. As a result, she felt caught up in operational tasks where she had no added value. This was something she knew she needed to change, especially given her imminent transition into ta foreign market which would require making important decisions in terms of her company’s strategic vision.

Through ongoing reflection, investigation and action-oriented exercises — including the practice of Fear setting — Bronze Rooster was able to identify that her aversion to strategy work and decision-making as a whole was deeply rooted in her perfectionism. By addressing her fears around failure, and asking herself the right questions, she regained the power to make lucid and rational choices and set clear objectives which would have a lasting and successful impact on her company:

• reframing her OKR’s
• letting go of an employee
• shifting her market focus from B2B & B2C to B2S
• branching out onto a new foreign market

The second part of Bronze Rooster’s ride was spent addressing her communication strategies and her expectations of her fellow executive management members. Her discomfort came from a yearning for greater balance and shared leadership, but which led her to compensate by being over-controlling and mistrustful. By working on concepts like constructive communication and radical candor, she was able to step back and identify how her behavior and expectations were sometimes at odds. Discerning and verbalizing her own true needs allowed her to achieve more satisfying communication results with those she worked with. This led to a more empathetic and balanced relationship with her colleagues, where she was able to step back from the control seat and access the authentic feedback she so desired, and build more trusting and impactful working relationships.