Career growth does not always come from climbing to the top of the largest company available. According to Michael Polk Newell Brands, some of the most valuable leadership experience happens inside smaller, resource-constrained organizations that force people to grow quickly.
Learning by Doing
Michael Polk, who led Newell Brands until 2019 after earlier stints at Kraft Foods and Unilever, now runs Implus LLC, a private fitness accessories company owned by Berkshire Partners. Unlike large public corporations, which often provide structured, multi-year leadership development programs, private companies like Implus tend to hand employees real responsibility much sooner, simply because there are fewer people and fewer resources to spread the work across. Michael Polk has pointed to this as one of the clearest benefits of the private company model, arguing that employees who learn by doing tend to develop faster than those working through formal training tracks alone.
Player Coaches in the Crucible
That dynamic also changes what senior leadership looks like day to day. Rather than setting strategy and stepping back, executives at smaller firms often stay closely involved in decisions as they unfold, helping their teams weigh tradeoffs in real time. Michael Polk has described his own approach at Implus in exactly these terms, spending far more of his time working directly with his team on brand and business development than he did while managing Newell Brands’ much larger organization.
The flatter structure at Implus LLC, with its sixteen brands and lean management layers, has also given Polk and his colleagues a broader view of the business, touching sourcing, manufacturing and retailer relationships all in the same week. For Michael Polk, that breadth of exposure is precisely what makes smaller companies such effective training grounds for future leaders, a lesson he says took decades of experience at larger public firms to fully appreciate and put into practice. Visit this page for more information.
More about Michael Polk on https://nyweekly.com/business/michael-polk-from-newell-ceo-to-growth-mindset-advocate/