Tech startups and software companies often move fast, scale rapidly or pivot suddenly in response to changing market conditions or business needs. The dizzying pace of growth and change can sometimes lead to friction and strain when departments and functions aren’t aligned, or when staff and leadership are out of sync, negatively affecting team dynamics and organizational effectiveness.
3 Roles to Future-Proof Your Company
- Chief of staff to operationalize the company vision.
- Internal communications and community role to keep employees engaged and aligned.
- Program manager to ensure smooth execution.
These challenges are magnified in the case of distributed companies since being geographically dispersed makes it harder to keep everyone on the same page. Amazon’s return-to-office mandate that recently made headlines illustrates that the real problem is effective management at a distance.
So how can fast-growing startups and distributed companies ensure that teams are aligned, nimble and agile even during rapid expansion or change? The key is what veteran business leader and startup coach Molly Graham calls “glue people” who help to align and tie together the work happening across an organization. If you want to future-proof your business and ensure long-term viability and success, you need to hire people who will act as the connective tissue between functions and teams.
What Are Glue Roles?
Some of the most important roles in a distributed company are glue roles that tie together various sub-departments across the company, keep them aligned and on track and help communication to flow smoothly among them. They have a big picture understanding of the company’s goals and the ability to translate that vision into the organization’s day-to-day functioning.
Glue roles can be leaders in engineering, product, customer experience, finance, people or operations. The common denominator is their focus on helping the whole organization fit together, making sure that company goals are clear, that departments and functions are aligned and that everyone is on the same page as the business scales or changes course.
Having served as a C-suite leader at distributed companies for over 10 years, I’ve seen firsthand what a difference these glue roles can make within an organization, if you hire the right people for them. These are people who are really strong at building cross-functional alignment and helping teams collaborate smoothly on cross-functional projects and programs, which is extremely important in a distributed workplace. They have a strong awareness of the overarching business goals and the ability to build bridges and connective tissues between the various parts of a company to help realize those goals.
Here are the three key glue roles that will help your organization thrive, especially during periods of growth and change.
1. Chief of Staff: Operationalizing the Company Vision.
The chief of staff role is often misunderstood in corporate environments because of its roots in government and because it’s often uniquely tailored to the executive and the context.
In a business context, the chief of staff role is increasingly hired to support C-level officers who oversee complex, multi-department organizations. Their role is to ensure that those departments are working together effectively. The chief of staff is the product manager who operationalizes the vision of the C-level executive they serve, which is crucial when the latter heads a complex organizational chart.
Given the speed and complexity with which modern tech companies operate, it’s helpful to have a chief of staff whose job is to stay plugged into various functions. As a senior role, the chief of staff has a high-level view of the work happening across an organization and acts as the connective tissue between the various business units. It allows C-level executives to have a wider span of control and helps avoid information or communication siloes. It syncs together various teams and functions, so that they’re always aligned and integrated.
The chief of staff’s job is not just the planning and operational running of projects, but holding up the structure and moving everyone forward. They are the human systems planner, the switchboard operator and the exec wrangler that pulls it all together.
2. Internal Communications and Community: Keeping Employees Engaged and Aligned.
A strong internal communications and community function is increasingly important, especially in remote, distributed and hybrid companies. The function is closely tied to the employee experience and supports engagement and alignment between a company and its workforce.
Traditionally, people think of communications as a one-way broadcasting of information from the top down. Ideally, it should be a two-way street. An internal communications and community role should have two components. The first is an employee listening component, tuning in and listening to what’s on the minds of employees, what they need and how they feel. The second component is taking that information and distilling it into key points for executives to communicate to the company.
In other words, this role helps maintain effective communication and cohesion between the various constituents of a company, from the leadership level to the rank and file. It enables staff and leadership to talk to each other effectively so that everyone stays connected and aligned on their shared vision and goals. Doing so ensures a strong employee experience by facilitating a sense of community and belonging within an organization based on a common purpose.
3. Program Manager: Ensuring Smooth Execution.
At the level of facilitating smooth cross-functional execution of complex projects, strong program managers are indispensable in a distributed workplace. Their role is much more than traditional project management, because a good program manager has a product design orientation with strong design, build and implementation skills. This means they bring a discovery-to-design approach to cross-functional projects, helping to hold together and guide a project as it evolves and takes shape.
Good program managers think about design not just from a software angle but from the perspective of how to build systems and processes that bring in many disparate parts to create something that has great fit for use.
Program management is an integrative, cross-departmental job that’s responsible for ensuring a company’s success on initiatives that travel across many different functional groups. The people in these roles should have excellent communication and organization skills, plus a design background helps considerably. They go beyond project management because it’s not just about planning and running projects, but thinking about the big picture and communicating that to a variety of different stakeholders.
Building a Stable Company for the Future
It’s increasingly clear that remote, hybrid and distributed workplaces are the future of work. You can stay ahead of the curve and future-proof your organization by thinking about these strategic, connective-tissue roles that will address and mitigate the operational, cultural and business challenges that invariably arise in fast-moving startups and software companies.
