Leadership Fundamentals for Startups
You got this far by doing, but now it’s time to lead more, even if it means doing less. Leadership is essential to success in any business, but especially for startups. If it was your (and possibly your cofounders’ idea), it’s hard to let go, but the company cannot scale without delegation. There are just too many new demands on your time.
Volumes are written on effective leadership, and while you should make a habit out of learning, well as much as you can, this too takes time, so to distill leadership down to some fundamental building blocks, we recommend you learn how to understand people’s energy levels and emotional triggers (including your own). Energy levels and emotional triggers drive people's behavior and performance.
Energy levels refer to physical and mental energy, both of which vary throughout the day. While most people think in terms of physical energy—driven by factors such as sleep, nutrition, exercise, and stress—it’s equally important that leaders learn of people’s mental energy. For example, when an introvert goes to a trade show, they burn more energy networking, and burn it faster than an extrovert. In fact, the extrovert may even get a an energy boost because they’re doing an activity that fuels their energy, but bring that extrovert back to the office to enter their leads into a CRM system and you may see them burning energy at a fast clip.
In a startup, you’re starting with a small team and if you can learn about how people burn and fuel their mental energy, you may be able to optimize work across the team to maximize their energy and achieve that sought after flow. Developers will develop, sales people will sell, and accountants will count (?), but if you can take any secondary or tertiary tasks and rebalance them across the team to align with people’s energy levels (including your own), you may find that one person’s bane is another person’s boon. It’s not always harmonized, but in the best cases, you’ll be able to keep energy up, and where you can’t you’ll still be able to lead by showing that you understand the ‘energy premium’ certain work costs for your team, and that level of empathy could drive even greater performance and loyalty as you grind out the next OKR.
This leads us to emotional triggers, another fundamental key to leadership. Emotional triggers are events, situations, or people that cause an automatic emotional response in a person. Emotional triggers can be positive or negative, and can have a significant impact on people's behavior and performance. Common triggers at the workplace include: criticism, helplessness or loss of control, and being excluded.
As a leader, it’s most important to understand and manage people’s triggers, and it starts with your own. Your team takes their cues from you and how you conduct yourself influences the culture by orders of magnitude. If you react rather than respond, you’ll see very quickly, that the people around you will go out of their way to limit the interaction, and even the flow of data in your direction. But you’ll also need to understand your team members’ triggers because it will impact the way they behave with one another.
Imagine an example where two colleagues are told to meet and work on a company problem. Person A takes punctuality very seriously and is triggered by the lack of punctuality in others. Person B sees meeting times as an estimate and casually strolls in 5min late with no explanation or apology. Person A reacts, Person B doesn’t sees no provocation and feels attacked. The meeting gets derailed before it ever got started. If conflict is something that causes either person to burn energy, you may find that the impact of this seemingly innocuous event has consequences far greater than the derailed meeting. It doesn’t take long to quantify the cost of events like these and they add up quickly.
Follow Socrates’ advice and “know thyself” and get to know your team. Whether it’s a team-building event or somethign you do one on one, the sooner you get an understanding of people’s energy levels and triggers, the sooner you can manage them and the more productive your organization will be.