Establishing World-Class Leadership Development Programs: GM & Flightpaths

Introduction

Today we are launching two leadership development programs that will help us achieve our goal of becoming one of the best places for talent to develop their skills in the world. The reason for this goal is simple…if we combine the best talent with the best founders, we will hit our North Star metric of creating 15,000 new jobs by 2030.

One program is called Flightpaths — it’s a leadership development initiative where you can start developing your leadership skills early on at KnowCap. As time goes on we will programmatically give more responsibility to team members.

The other initiative is called General Manager Track, which is designed to prepare talented people with high potential (and ambition) to be future leaders of their own companies.

A personal goal of mine is to become one of the world’s best talent development organizations, and I feel like up until now we have lacked a strategy to achieve this.

When I speak of becoming the world’s best — I mean a place that ANYONE can come in, stay for six months, and be able to demonstrably convey how they deserve a promotion either at KnowCap( or at another organization).

That’s about to change.

Talent development is core to our values

Talent development is something that I’ve cared deeply about. Even though I had never been a manager before 2016, in my first leadership position I always told new team members that I wanted them to leave the team better than when they got there; whether by staying with us or moving on. That is why, as their boss, I am constantly pushing people as hard as they can go. Not for me, it’s because I want to honor my promise to help you reach your professional goals.

This isn’t just altruism. I know how much loyalty and trust is developed when you are focused on helping someone reach the next level of their professional development. It does not always go smoothly, as many bristle at direct feedback and being pushed to their extremes. The ones that embrace the challenge are usually the ones that get the most out of working on really hard problems.

And let’s be honest, the problem KnowCap is solving is one of the hardest out there.

Tracks and Roadmaps

In our ongoing efforts to build out a scalable, robust leadership development program, we’ve created workflow documentation for the purpose of hiring (and then developing) new talent. We have precise attributable growth roadmaps — there are very specific ways that you can rise up at our on our team.

We have a clear plan for what to do and how to be selected for leadership positions. We have an internal guide on interacting with others and how to raise your hand in order to be selected into the President track. All of this is so that we can develop you effectively internally with as much intentionality as we can.

We also have a robust onboarding strategy and packet that take place when people join. This combined with the mandates that our directors serve under, all make our organization ripe for people to thrive.

The intention here is that they’re not just getting thrown to the wolves. Each director has created a deck. Each comes with a link to a packet. Each packet is not only how every single thing that we do gets delivered, with the associated timelines, it is how they fit within the whole mission of KnowCap.

We wanted to make sure that every team member could drawn a straight line from any task/project all the way to our mission.

The content includes links to important resources, blog posts, and videos that will help people from the earliest stages of learning about who we are as a company. I film a weekly video and some of the directors use it when onboarding team members to provide context about what we’re building and why all of these pieces are important.

Switching from being reactive to proactive

Our current practices have come about more as addressing a need or filling a gap, rather than how they should have been designed from a position of empathy.

So we asked a question — “how do we proactively develop talent?”

Our aim is to not only develop talent but have a strategy in place so when there is an influx of funding we are able to execute flawlessly. So many companies get large amounts of funding and lose their discipline, we will not be one of them.

We want to make sure that we have a pipeline of future leaders in place. For this reason, we’ve put the right people in positions early and then given them more responsibility as they grow. Once those slugs of the capital hit our bank account, to allow us to scale, we have exactly the right team members in the right places to spin up more ecosystems.

This goes back to my goal of having our infrastructure so well set that, as long as there is the capital needed to do so, we can spin up an ecosystem anywhere in the country (and eventually the world) in less than 90 days. That means talent is recruited, legal and finance is handled, and founders are signing investment deals with their local KnowCap. That’s how we are building this ship to take the future into account in the present day.

We understood that we needed to scale the business and knew that it was paramount for human capital to be at the forefront of this growth. To that end, In order to scale, we need to make sure that we had a fair and comprehensive way of evaluating that human capital.

More importantly, we need a way to develop it. If we can do that effectively, we can expand our ratio of deploying $25 for every $1 we receive in venture capital (an unheard-of stat).

Announcing the GM Track and Flightpaths

This piece is actually an external formal announcement of two new initiatives that we are about to execute on. A lot of my thought processes, up until a few months ago, were about ensuring our external strategies and execution are in alignment. We have experimented with a lot of tactics and have focused deeply on getting those pieces into play.

At this point, we are in a position of steady (albeit not exponential) growth until we receive more funding. This relaxation of stress on our infrastructure has allowed us to examine the other side of the equation that will have a major impact on our success. While we haven’t solved all of the pieces that affect us externally. we’re not going to be able to finish the job there until we’re able to get an adequate amount of funding.

That said, settling and waiting is not a valid path to take. It’s against our ethos. Our only option is to continue attacking and improving our success rates by pulling other levers.

So now we’re going to turn inward.

That way when the funding does come, we’re able to execute with excellence and execute speed, and we’re able to show all the people who pass that they were sorely mistaken.

General Manager Track

General manager roles are done at a lot of larger companies. We do ours a bit differently. Our GM program is going to be a new way of people to develop their executive leadership and operator skills while still at KnowCap.

Formerly, the only way to do that was to rise in our organization was to join the Ecosystem President track. After doing some surveying, we realized not everybody wants to lead their own ecosystem or a constellation of ecosystems.

Some people want to be the CEO of their own startup.

As we displayed in our Product Ecosystem announcement, we have a lot of ways of supporting entrepreneurship at its earliest stages. Many of them will occur outside of our Startup Engine process and we need leaders to operate them.

“How do we facilitate that?” That was a question we have asked a lot over the past four months. We also wanted to determine how do we get our products in the right position to score.

This means looking at what skills our team members need in their current role and what potential future roles may be. We also examined how those skill sets can improve over time until potentially transforming into a career-defining leadership position. As a result, we created this general manager role. It’s pretty comprehensive and will be a huge challenge for anyone who takes it on.

We spent years failing, tweaking, testing, and bending rules. Once we found the limits of the rules, then it was time to break them or create new ones ourselves. Our GM track will be one of the times that we break those rules — a blend of an entrepreneur in residence and traditional corporate environments.

Flightpaths

The other initiative that we are launching is Flightpaths. I’m REALLY excited about this one.

We’ve noticed that as time goes by and people add to our teams across our ecosystems, sometimes they don’t have a next step planned out for them. They don’t know where to go to find information.

They don’t know what they need to do to begin leading at KnowCap. To date, we’ve relied on directors focusing primarily on leadership development and this has been an individualized situation for directors with varying degrees of success. Flightpaths will take some of the subjectivity off their plates and make it easier to spot potential within their functions.

To recruit only the most talented people, we have implemented a system of consistently “upgrading” them to new challenges as they develop skills throughout their time at KnowCap.

Not all executive leadership is homegrown. We try to develop leaders by putting them in some leadership situations early and then expanding their responsibilities from there. This is mostly learned through failure, so what we want to do is create a safe environment, that’s easy to replicate and can be scaled by giving people opportunities early on.

Inclusive missions should include team members

At KnowCap, opportunities will be available for all talent and they’ll “unlock” it in as little as four months. A new challenge will be unlocked each quarter after that. Every time they start new challenges — they know what’s coming ahead of time. That is why extensively documenting them, to level set expectations.

It is also why we have Flighpaths on a 24-month cycle. Once they’re out, they can either choose to become a GM, an ecosystem director, or the ecosystem president track. This develops a deep bench of talent from the ground up that can be ready to take on the launches of new projects and ecosystems.

Designing a systematized process that will allow us to pursue new growth opportunities, instead of waiting for it, is in our DNA. We’ve done it with our Startup Engine process, with our Knowledge Capital investment model, and now with leadership development. We never want to be hit with a demand for operators and not able to find the right person.

If we recruit leadership externally, those team members would need a lot more time to learn our ways than if they started from the beginning with us. These new initiatives create a smooth pipeline for how we do things, which allows us to reverse engineer our growth projections from there.

We already have a process of how to train Ecosystem Presidents. Now we’re going to figure out how to train Ecosystem Directors. Then we’ll determine the best way to turn interns into elite professionals.

Creating a Talent Development Flywheel

These programs will round out our Talent Development Flywheel.

By continually promoting talented people and giving them opportunities for leadership, we are confident that our company will be capable of overcoming any challenges in the event of any kind of continuity emergency.

They will be able vision cast just as well as I can, recruit as well as I can, and evaluate companies just as well as I do. Basically, this is an announcement on me working myself out of a job.

I’ve already done this before.

The ecosystem president of KnowCap Detroit is someone who started on the management track early and we just worked together to create a system, and now we’re just codifying that system of how we got them to go from where they started all the way to becoming an ecosystem leader.

Conclusion

We hope this announcement is helpful.

We realize some investors are going to care, others might not be as interested. KnowCap founders are going to care about it and future team members are also going to care just as much (if not more).

Putting these pieces out into the wild help us with recruiting as well. We can send this to potential team members to show how intentional we are about helping them develop and pursue amazing opportunities once they leave here. Now we have a new program to address the concern that someone might have about not getting proper development opportunities.

Even if they’re only here for six months. They will be better at leading than they were before.

We’ll make sure that that’s our brand promise to them.