She Was Restarting Her Career In a New Company
Name: Athena
Client Position Before Griffin Dunn: Start-up COO
Client Position After Griffin Dunn: Vice President of Operations
Industry: Hi-tech
Company Stats
1200 employees
Startup
Post-Series C Round
Considered a bellwether in its industry
Client Needs
Developing an effective structure for her team
Creating a trusting environment for her team
Working on becoming a trusted servant leader
Creating trust and relationships with peers and teams
Adapting to high-velocity, low-resource situations
Implementing new policies, procedures, and processes
Unifying the entire team and company while helping individuals realize and focus on their specialty
Scenario
When Athena came to Griffin Dunn, she had just left a difficult role as start-up COO. This new role, which was a step down for her in title, was actually a much broader span of responsibility. In fact, she was the only VP within the company when joined. She was given responsibility for a large and unstructured team and department. She felt overwhelmed at the work to be done and wanted help to align and build her staff into a high-performing team.
Intervention
While working with Griffin Dun, we helped her envision, craft and deploy the right structure for her department and her team. We helped her to be comfortable in taking on the responsibility to fix her organizational problems first, and then begin to participate as a problem-solver for issues concerning the company as a whole.
She first had to work on her presence and compassion as a leader to instill her authority and build trust with her team. This allowed her to explore and build her skill as a servant-leader. We worked with her to recognize the importance of relationships with peers and other department teams in accomplishing her own team’s goals.
This reduced the amount of friction in her team, which then freed her up to manage up to the leadership team and prioritize important goals and projects. This resulted in fewer busy work projects that had plagued the team before her arrival.
Outcome
She became a trusted entity in her team, and in the company. She became known and appreciated for her advice, knowledge and guidance. She is now well positioned to be a COO in this larger organization with a greater span of responsibility and oversight.