09-management-team

name	09-management-team
description	Use when producing or reviewing the 09 management team component of a business plan; applies its specialist evidence, decisions, and acceptance tests instead of neighbouring pipeline skills.
metadata	{"portable":true,"compatible_with":["claude-code","codex"]}

Management Team & Organisation Skill

Overview

Generate Section 09 of the business plan: the management and team section. Use this skill to show who is responsible for execution, where the team is strong, and how leadership gaps will be managed.

Use When

• Use when drafting or revising the management team section for lenders, investors, grant funders, or partners.
• Use when the business needs founder bios, governance clarity, hiring logic, or a leadership credibility case.
• Use when team quality is material to the reader's confidence in execution.

Do Not Use When

• Do not use to repeat the company story instead of showing execution capacity.
• Do not inflate biographies or titles beyond what the evidence supports.
• Do not hide skill gaps that a funder or investor will immediately notice.

Required Inputs

• Founder and management bios, roles, ownership, and reporting lines
• Current staffing, future hiring needs, advisors, and governance arrangements
• Audience context where leadership credibility standards differ
• Adjacent section outputs that rely on specific people, capabilities, or oversight

Workflow

1. Establish who leads the business today and what each person is accountable for.
2. Convert experience into execution-relevant evidence, not vanity credentials.
3. Map governance, advisors, and hiring needs to the scale of the business.
4. Surface capability gaps and show how they will be closed.
5. Apply references/coaching-performance-management.md when execution depends on training, behaviour change, coaching, mentoring, supervision, sales discipline, service standards, or AI adoption.
6. Reconcile leadership claims with operations, implementation, and financial assumptions.
7. Flag key-person risk or governance weaknesses that affect bankability.

Quality Bar

• The section makes clear who will execute the plan and why they are credible.
• Bios are relevant, concise, and linked to business needs.
• Governance and hiring logic are proportional to the business stage.
• Team gaps are explicit and responsibly managed.

Anti-Patterns

• CV-style biography dumps with no link to execution.
• Hiding dependence on one founder or one technical expert.
• Presenting advisors as substitutes for operating leadership.
• Team claims that conflict with payroll, timeline, or operational reality.

Outputs

• A finished or revised Section 09 management team draft
• Team structure, governance notes, and hiring-gap analysis
• Explicit leadership assumptions and execution risks for follow-up

Generate a team section that convinces investors the right people are driving this business. Investors bet on teams as much as ideas.

What to Generate

Required Elements

1. Founders and key executives Bios with relevant experience
2. Organisational chart Reporting structure and departments
3. Roles and responsibilities Clear accountability for each leader
4. Advisory board External advisors and their contributions
5. Board of directors Governance structure (if applicable)
6. Skills gap analysis What expertise is missing and how it will be filled
7. Hiring plan Key hires needed, timeline, and budget
8. Compensation overview Salary ranges, equity, incentive structure
9. Company culture Values in practice, working environment

Team Member Bio Template

Name:
Title/Role:
Background: [2-3 sentences on relevant experience]
Key achievements: [Quantified accomplishments]
Education: [Relevant qualifications]
Role in this venture: [Specific responsibilities]

What Investors Look For in Teams

• Domain expertise Deep knowledge of the industry
• Execution track record Have they built something before?
• Complementary skills Technical + commercial + operational coverage
• Commitment Full-time dedication, skin in the game
• Coachability Willingness to learn and adapt

Team Development Awareness

When describing team-building plans, reference Tuckman's stages (Dennis et al., 2021):

1. Forming Getting to know each other, learning expectations
2. Storming Conflict over control, direction, roles (normal and necessary)
3. Norming Establishing norms, relationships solidify
4. Performing Team works productively toward goals
5. Adjourning Transition after project/phase completion

Investors value founders who understand that team conflict (storming) is a natural stage, not a failure signal. Show how the team navigates disagreements constructively.

Change Management Capability

For businesses implementing new systems or processes, demonstrate the team's ability to drive adoption (Dennis et al., 2021):

• Stakeholder analysis: Assess personal costs/benefits of changes for each group
• Adopter distribution: Plan for ~25% ready adopters, ~50% reluctant (follow the flow), ~25% resistant
• Strategy: Support ready adopters as internal champions; focus training on the 20% of functions used 80% of the time

Generation Process

1. Ask for: founder names, backgrounds, team size, key roles filled/unfilled
2. Write compelling bios emphasising relevant achievements
3. Create organisational chart
4. Identify skills gaps honestly
5. Build hiring plan aligned with implementation timeline (section 13)
6. Define advisory board needs based on gaps

Quality Criteria

• Bios highlight relevant experience, not general career history
• Skills gaps are acknowledged openly with a plan to fill them
• Org chart is realistic for current stage (not over-structured)
• Hiring plan aligns with financial projections and growth timeline
• Advisory board members add genuine strategic value

Advisory Board Structure

Include an advisory board with four types of advisors (Blank & Dorf, 2012):

Type	Role	What They Provide
Sales/Marketing advisor	Guide customer acquisition strategy	Channel expertise, customer introductions
Industry advisor	Deep domain knowledge	Market insights, credibility, connections
Technical advisor	Technology and product guidance	Architecture decisions, technical hiring
CEO/Founder advisor	Strategic and leadership counsel	Fundraising guidance, governance, scaling wisdom

Founders Must Lead Discovery

In early-stage ventures, founders must personally lead customer discovery and validation this cannot be delegated to hired executives (Blank & Dorf, 2012). Show in the management section that the founding team is directly engaged with customers, not just managing from behind a desk.

Founder Dimension Profile and Leader Assessment (Gerber)

Use the Four Dimensions framework (Gerber, 2008) to assess the founding team's completeness and the leader's execution readiness. See references/awakening-entrepreneur-gerber.md for full detail.

Dimension assessment (state which dimension dominates each founder):

Founder	Dominant Dimension	Weakest Dimension	Gap Coverage
[Name]	[Dreamer/Thinker/Storyteller/Leader]	[Dimension]	[How gap is filled]

Leader's 10 Core Beliefs (use as evaluation criteria for the COO / key executive hire): A business leader must be enthralled with the Dream, not merely supportive of it. Evaluate candidate leaders against:

1. Leads with Purpose; commits to the Mission absolutely
2. Once committed, does not alter commitment until the result is achieved
3. Creates and lives by clear operating standards
4. Creates and commits to clear operating results
5. Surrounds themselves with Mission believers
6. Recruits people committed to the standards, results, and faithful to their commitments

Leader's 10 Operating Standards (execution discipline for senior hires): Evaluate whether the candidate leader can:

• Produce results with little or no capital, information, or prior experience
• Inspire people without money or obvious incentives
• Manage people without blame correcting without making people wrong
• Communicate the Dream so that 90% of people they speak with buy into it
• Replicate successes and rise above failures systematically

The Fatal Assumption risk: The management section must explicitly address whether the business currently depends on a single individual for any critical function. Where it does, name the system or hire that removes that dependency.

Cite as: (Gerber, Awakening the Entrepreneur Within, 2008)

Founder Purpose Statement (Kaza)

Every management team section should include a founder purpose statement not a mission statement, but an honest account of why this business, for this founder, at this time. This matters to investors and lenders because purpose-aligned founders build more durable businesses and are more likely to navigate setbacks without abandoning the venture.

A strong purpose statement answers:

1. What problem are you solving that genuinely matters to you? (Not just "there is a market opportunity")
2. What does success look like for you personally not just financially? (Work-life balance, community impact, independence, legacy)
3. Is the business model designed to serve your life, or will it consume it?

The objective function by stage (Kaza, 2025):

Stage	Typical Founder Objective
Pre-revenue / early	Prove the concept; survive; learn
Growth (Year 13)	Build financial security; scale what works
Mature (Year 3+)	Optimise for quality of life; build systems that work without the founder
Exit / succession	Build transferable value; plan succession

Purpose drift warning: Businesses that lose alignment between the founder's purpose and the business model tend to either stagnate (founder loses motivation) or collapse at growth inflection points (founder burns out). Where a founder has left corporate employment to start a business, explicitly document what they are moving towards not just what they are moving away from. Lenders and DFI investors increasingly assess founder resilience; purpose alignment is a key indicator.

Business plan language: Avoid sterile corporate language ("The business aims to maximise shareholder value"). Instead, write purpose in concrete, personal terms: "After 12 years managing logistics for a multinational, [Name] saw that smallholder farmers in Lira District were losing 30% of their perishables to poor cold chain access. [Name] launched [Business] to change that and to build something that can employ her extended family when she eventually steps back from day-to-day operations."

Cite as: (Kaza, Unconvention, 2025)

References

• Personnel correspondence standards: See ../00-plan-assembly/references/commercial-correspondence-ashley.md (Section 12) for job advertisement formats (full vs abbreviated), application letter structure, CV/resume sections, covering letter template, acceptable explanations for leaving previous employer, invitation-to-interview wording, job offer letter structure (post + salary + start date + probation + acceptance deadline), and declining-an-applicant letter Source: Ashley (OUP, 2003). Read when writing the hiring plan, HR procedures, or when generating document templates for personnel correspondence.
• African Entrepreneurship & Business Success Factors Empirical findings on what drives African business success: innovation as #1 predictor, complete records, prior career experience, sponsorship/mentorship; failure patterns (family mismanagement, poor stock control, part-time management); ITM local management formula (hire locals, not expatriates); mass market opportunity in underserved segments; barony risk when delegating to entrenched local managers from Beveridge & Oberschall (Princeton, 1979) and Sardanis (I.B. Tauris, 2007). Read when assessing founder credibility, building team narratives, or advising on local hiring strategy.
• Women's Entrepreneurship in Uganda Evidence-based analysis of gender constraints and opportunities: women earn 30% lower profits than male counterparts despite equal ability; 41% less labour, 50% less capital, 37% less product innovation; only 6% of women operate in male-dominated sectors yet earn 2 the profits when they do; 141% profit increase from female-concentrated to male-dominated sector; psychology-based personal initiative training boosts profits 40% vs 5% for standard training; larger loans (not microfinance) drive transformational growth; psychometric credit scoring as collateral alternative; role model exposure raises crossover probability 2028%; sectoral map of female-concentrated vs male-dominated sectors in Uganda; practical implications for management narratives, advisory board, and funding strategy Source: World Bank/IFC (2022) and Copley, Gokalp & Kirkwood. Read when the founder or majority shareholder is a woman, or when the business targets women employees or customers.
• Leadership & Greatness Frameworks Level 5 Leadership, First Who Then What, Hedgehog Concept, Stockdale Paradox, Culture of Discipline, Flywheel, and Technology Accelerator frameworks from Good to Great by Jim Collins, with practical application guidance for each business plan section

July 2026 Portable Contract

Required Inputs

Input artefact	Source/provider	Required	Behaviour when absent
Role requirements, verified biographies, workload, organisation design, compensation assumptions, and hiring evidence for 09 management team	Founders, HR records, approved payroll model, and reference evidence	Yes	If absent, a biography, role need, workload, or pay assumption is unavailable, mark it unverified and keep the role or hire conditional.
Finalised business brief, target reader, country, and stage	Client intake and engagement owner	Yes	Stop section decisions and route the missing context to client intake.
Reconciled upstream assumptions that this section consumes	Named pipeline owners	Conditional	Record the dependency, affected claim, owner, and recovery step; do not substitute an invented value.

Outputs

Artefact	Consumer	Observable acceptance condition
Management-team section and staged organisation and hiring plan	Plan author and target decision-maker	The artefact answers the section decision and traces each material conclusion to the supplied evidence.
09 management team exception and handoff note	Downstream section owners	Every blocked or conditional item names its consequence, owner, evidence request, and restart condition.
09 management team release record	Reviewer or plan assembler	Records the checks completed, failures, unassessed items, professional review required, and release state.

Evidence Produced

Evidence	Format	Acceptance condition
Credential trace, accountability map, hiring trigger, and payroll reconciliation	Source-linked table, calculation, or annotated prose	The evidence is reproducible from named inputs and distinguishes verified fact, management assumption, and inference.
09 management team decision record	Decision note	States the selected action, rejected credible alternative, countercase, rationale, and risk accepted or avoided.
09 management team review trace	Gate entry	Identifies the date, input versions, reviewer role, failed checks, recovery owner, and any check that remains not assessed.

Capability and Permission Boundaries

For 09 management team, the controlling focus is leadership evidence, accountability, governance, workload, succession, and staged hiring. This skill may analyse roles using authorised records; it may not verify credentials by assertion, disclose sensitive HR data, hire, discipline, or set compensation without authority. Its normal mode is read-only analysis and drafting. Any mutation, external communication, spending, certification, or professional conclusion outside that boundary requires explicit authority and must remain traceable to the approving role.

Degraded Mode

For 09 management team, loss of evidence about leadership evidence, accountability, governance, workload, succession, and staged hiring activates degraded mode. If the controlling 09 management team evidence is unavailable, the same boundary applies. When a biography, role need, workload, or pay assumption is unavailable, mark it unverified and keep the role or hire conditional. Return the verified subset, label the affected decision qualified or not assessed, explain the downstream consequence, and state the smallest evidence request or authorised action that permits recovery. Do not convert the missing check into a pass.

Decision Rules

Choice or condition	Action	Failure or risk avoided
For 09 management team, a named leader lacks evidenced capacity for a critical accountability	state the gap, assign interim ownership, and define the hire, adviser, or development trigger	Founder-centric organisation claims hide execution and governance gaps
For 09 management team, A current legal, regulatory, tax, accounting, market, or platform claim controls the 09 management team decision	Verify the controlling source, effective date, jurisdiction, and reviewer status before release	Stale external facts become permanent plan assumptions
For 09 management team, The evidence reconciles with neighbouring sections and the countercase does not overturn the choice	Complete management-team section and staged organisation and hiring plan, attach the evidence and release record, and hand off named dependencies	Premature release and repeated downstream rework

Workflow

1. Define the exact 09 management team decision, intended reader, jurisdiction, business stage, and permission boundary.
2. Collect role requirements, verified biographies, workload, organisation design, compensation assumptions, and hiring evidence and map each material conclusion to its source; stop the affected conclusion when an input could change it.
3. Apply the specialist methods and directly linked references already contained in this skill, retaining its domain thresholds, calculations, and Uganda or East Africa context where applicable.
4. Compare the credible alternatives, test the countercase and failure path, and apply the decision table rather than selecting a template default.
5. Produce management-team section and staged organisation and hiring plan with the evidence, exception, and handoff records; reconcile every shared assumption with its owning section.
6. Run the section quality checks, applicable finance or professional review, and anti-slop gate. If a gate fails, correct the evidence or decision and return to the responsible step.

Quality Standards

• Management-team section and staged organisation and hiring plan must answer a real decision for the named bank, investor, DFI, grant, board, or strategic-partner reader.
• Credential trace, accountability map, hiring trigger, and payroll reconciliation must be source-linked, dated where facts can change, and sufficient for another reviewer to reproduce the conclusion.
• The section exposes its countercase, stop condition, recovery action, and effect on neighbouring sections.
• No unavailable source, calculation, tool, or professional review is reported as passed; finance and statutory judgements follow the governing doctrine.
• Language remains specific to 09 management team, uses British English naturally, and passes the repository anti-slop gate without promotional filler.

Anti-Patterns

• In 09 management team, treating an unavailable role requirements, verified biographies, workload, organisation design, compensation assumptions, and hiring evidence as confirmed. Correction: qualify the affected conclusion and issue the named evidence request.
• Producing management-team section and staged organisation and hiring plan that restates the brief but makes no choice. Correction: record the choice, rejected alternative, rationale, countercase, and implication.
• Ignoring a conflicting upstream assumption. Correction: return it to its owning section and resume only from a reconciled version.
• Reporting an unavailable check as passed. Correction: mark it not assessed and narrow the release state.
• Claiming compliance, assurance, bankability, or investor readiness from narrative quality. Correction: run the applicable gate and retain its evidence.
• Copying the worked example into a client plan. Correction: use the method only and replace every fact with verified engagement evidence.

Worked Example

The founder owns strategy, sales, finance approval, and operations review. Reassign one control role, define the first hiring trigger, and show how governance changes before growth adds volume.

References

• Load this skill's primary method or template before applying the 09 management team decision rules.
• For 09 management team claims involving money, tax, grants, reserves, revenue, cost, valuation, or financial statements, apply the Chwezi finance doctrine and record the required professional-review state; illustrative figures never become client facts.