As Founders every day brings to us questions we can’t answer. Thats why we created the Ask Me Anything sessions with the In Residence CxO team.
Join the next one on Wednesday Jan 11 @ 5pm (UK / Lisbon). REGISTER HERE.
In our first AMA (held in December) the questions were a lot about careers and education. It was very interesting to get the different views from across the In Residence team present on the day. Not everyone agreed of course, but you’d hope for that! The goal of the AMA is to give perspectives from experience and help Founders to develop options. Then the decision to execution path is down to them and their own circumstances.
In terms of topics, there is no fixed agenda. You can send your questions in advance, add them as a comment to this article or just come along for the live webinar and chip in. The webinar will be live streamed so if the topics you want to cover are a bit more confidential you might prefer to SET UP AN INDIVIDUAL SESSION WITH AN IN RESIDENCE CXO.
What if we don’t know the answer? Well, it’s likely to happen at some point that we get posed a question which none of the team can really cover with their points of experience. Between the group we average 15+ years of experience each in starting and growing companies but by no means do we expect to have every answer covered. When that happens we’ll do some research, ask others in the community and come back to you with what we find out.
Resilience
Across Canopy, the core topic for January is resilience. By this we mean setting up to be resilient to all the things that come at us as Founders, and the internal challenges we can face.
When you operate inside a large organisation there are plenty of resources to support you. HR is one of them of course, and line managers. Online support and even health insurance for things like talk therapies. When you start your own company, its the team of me, myself and I. Things don’t quite hang together the same. You’ve got to take care of yourself because noone else will do it for you. You’ve also got to start taking care of others, as you are now the person they look to for guidance. As the Founder you have a duty of care.
Your efficacy in being resilient will have a great influence over many things in the company. Culture is the obvious one, but so is cadence. The speed at which your organisation is able to execute will depend a great deal on how you’ve established the right mechanisms to engender resilience across the team.
Questions to ask yourself?
Here are five questions to ask yourself about resilience and we offer them as a way of kick starting your own discussions about the topic:
Do you have a healthy routine in your day to day life?
When you can’t cope (or don’t know something), where do you go for help?
How do you set the pace for the team?
How do you feel when you make a mistake?
Do you know what success looks like for 2023?
It would be great to hear what you came up with when you thought about these questions. If you’re comfortable to do so please share your thoughts at the AMA on Wednesday or add a comment to this article.
We all get wiser and we all get stronger when we share within the community like this.
Wishing you every success in 2023
S.