Mark MacLeodFounder, Limitless.ceo · The Startup CEO Coach | Helping ambitious CEOs & founders scale world-changing companies without sacrificing their health, happiness, purpose, or humanity

How to avoid a 2 tiered leadership team, Elizabeth Caley - CEO at Poppy

19 Apr 2024 · 1 min

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Excerpt from a YouTube interview (Apr 19, 2024) in which Mark MacLeod asks Elizabeth Caley whether tight co-founders risk creating a two-tiered leadership team. Elizabeth says preventing a two-tiered structure required deliberate work; she notes co-founders frequently have quick, private catch-ups (e.g., 15-minute syncs) which can unintentionally exclude other leaders and that they needed to bring others into key conversations.

Chapters

I'm curious just given how tight you, the two of you are as you've started to build out the leadership team, is it like there's this founder unit and then there's everyone else? Does it end up creating a two tiered leadership team? How do you avoid that?
It was a lot of deliberate work to make sure because, you know, co founders, we're talking to each other, like, dropping the kids off at school and like, oh, we got a call at 1. And I've got meetings until then. And you've got meetings until then. So we're going to like, 15 minute catch up on what we're doing this today. Oh, and this other thing comes up that we should probably have be having this conversation with that sales leader, too. But we're just catching up.