The perfect startup executive
Leadership was probably one of my biggest insecurities when I started my career.
In my early years as an entrepreneur I always believed in this myth of the perfect startup executive.
Somewhere out there, there would be some kind of executive with magical superpowers that would finally show me how everything I had been doing was wrong.
They would come into my business, have some kind of unbeatable set of management tools and skyrocket my business to the next level.
I imagined these executives as having this “holy trinity of leadership”:
⁃ Visionary excellence: An incredibly consistent way of setting mission and vision statements, and then presenting them with some kind of Steve Jobs level of inspiration.
⁃ Operational excellence: A flawless system or methodology to run and improve daily operations. (Black belt, six sigma, lean startup, OKRs, GTD, you name it)
⁃ Manager-of-the-year listener: They would have an innate supernatural ability to listen to their teams. Their people would happily commit to those daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly rituals. All in the warmth and embrace of a great culture and a safe space.
Over the past 15 years I have worked with all kinds of executives. From expensive senior leaders with fancy backgrounds, to interim managers, to consultants all the way to employees that grew from within the company.
Whenever I first started working with them, they always felt like they would be the solution to all my problems and personal shortcomings.
However over time I have learned that especially in the early days, the only silver bullet to the leadership your company needs, is you, with all your flaws.
Let me explain.
Far from perfect
Entrepreneurs are far from perfect. They are typically impatient, impulsive, see opportunities everywhere, can be very directive, not always good listeners, stubborn and are not necessarily good at admitting their own failures.
I might be generalizing this too much but at least I can say the above counts for me.
Those qualities however allowed me to very quickly spot what works in a market and what doesn’t.
Especially in the early stages that really matters. Things will constantly go wrong and the money (if there is any at all) will constantly be running out.
If we reflect back on the holy trinity of leadership I highlighted in the beginning, it would look as follows.
Visionary excellence:
Very often the vision is the most pure component in an entrepreneur. It is deeply rooted in something we personally care about.
All the first hires typically sense this in the founder, even when it is not explicitly written in beautiful marketing statements on the wall.
However a lot of it is based on gut feeling. Things are done because it “feels right”, not only because it makes money. (Even though that obviously also plays a role).
Operational excellence:
Founders are typically extremely good operators of their own discipline and goals.
The moment that goes beyond their own whiteboard scribbles, hard to do lists and top 3 problems to attack however, they will struggle to scale that.
In a small team however, the team is intuitively on the same page as the founder. There is a lot of implicit understanding of problems to solve and the methodology, no matter how low tech (we use 1 whiteboard), is followed by everyone.
Manager-of-the-year listener:
In my last years at my previous company I had the pleasure to work with probably the best people manager I ever hired. He started out as our sales manager and afterwards took over from me as general manager.
He would never forget anything you told him, and he was always there for you. No birthday was ever forgotten, he knew exactly when your flight left and landed for holidays, and would always wish you well or welcome you back.
This was not a show for him, it was his second nature to care.
Where he would always put his people first, I had the tendency to put the challenge of beating the market first. This meant I would put whatever work was needed to beat the market on the agenda for that quarter.
Obviously this is also done in conversation with the team. But this can also mean lots of pressure on those that take on the challenge.
1 executive cannot cover the holy trinity
After my first startup reached product market fit, and we grew over the magical barrier of €1.000.000 revenue lots of new challenges followed on leadership.
I have since seen the incredible impact one leader can have on the growth or failure of the company.
But one thing is for sure, none of all the leaders had all 3 qualities of the holy trinity. One would typically always be flawed, wether it was visionary excellence, operational excellence or people management skills.
So count on the fact that to cover the entire holy trinity, you will typically need more than 1 person or need to step in on 1 (typically the Visionary pillar).
The imperfect startup executive
The reality of starting a company is that the only executive that can lead this extremely flawed ship in the beginning, is you.
I’m not particularly good at any of the holy trinity skills for leadership, but I am skilled enough at each of them to improvise my way through the rocky waters of a startup.
Because at this stage of a company it’s ok to not be the ultimate visionary, operations guru or manager.
It’s fine to be a bit of all the above, because nobody can be the perfect cocktail of skills and dedication that you inherently are.
