Startup Life 102: Leadership

Posted by Joseph Ansanelli on Feb 23, 2009 in Startups, Teams | 2 comments

I recently posted Startup Life 101 which suggested that in order to succeed in having a successful life while in a startup, you need to have a plan and to set the right pace. This is akin to running a marathon or even better succeeding in the Tour De France.

Re-connecting with Stew Friedman from the Wharton school, who has a book and teaches a class titled Total Leadership, is what got me thinking about this topic.

Startup Life 102 is about the importance of leadership. By that, I suggest that for people to have more successful lives requires leadership – leadership both in thinking about your team’s complete life and for yourself to become a leader in taking control of your own destiny.

Leadership
Leadership is somewhat of a loaded term. There are lots of different opinions on the definition of a leader. I subscribe to the definition of a leader as someone with followers. Yes, that’s it. A leader is quite simply someone with followers. It is not about a title, an organizational structure, a personality type, or anything other than the one common trait that every leader has – followers.

Truthfully, the cynical side of me said that “Total Leadership” was just a marketing ploy leveraging the term “leadership” to get people to buy into a time management philosophy. So what does leadership have to with thinking about someone’s complete life?

It turns out there are two important concepts (and probably more) which make Stew’s ideas about leadership. They are:
1) Managing with the end game in mind by having a plan for where you want to go and communicating it over and over again to all the important stakeholders.
2) Thinking individually and “situationally” about people and their needs in order to achieve those goals.

Having a plan
I’ve written about the importance of having a plan in “If you don’t know where you’re going, well, you’re lost” and won’t go into details here. However, one additional thought is the importance of having a plan for yourself – a key theme in Total Leadership. If you and your team or you and your boss are in agreement on the objectives, it makes the second idea of Situational Leadership much easier.

Situational leadership
So what is situational leadership? As the name implies, it is a style of leadership that takes into account the unique needs of a particular person (or of a situation) and acting in a way that is specific to them. This idea ranges from as simple as how you communicate with someone to how they work each day to their compensation and objectives. In other words, keep your HR manual to a minimum and stop the “one size fits all” thinking or worse, stop thinking about the team as a 1920 era production line.

The way to put this into practice is to start with a focus on goals and objectives – both for yourself and also for your team and each person on it. If you are clear with expectations of what people need to achieve, then you can give the team more flexibility in how they organize their days to get it done. By having flexibility, they can then optimize the other areas of their lives around these objectives.

A simple example is if someone wants to work from home one day a week. It should be ok as long as they achieve the objectives. This does not mean that you don’t need an office (though in some cases you don’t), but it means as a leader, you should be flexible and allow your teams to experiment with different ways to get work done to ensure they can be successful in other aspects of their lives.

And if you do, people will be more loyal, probably work harder, and the results will likely be better than you imagined. Let’s face it, the days of “command and control” leadership as well as the idea of workers finding a job and loyally toiling away through to retirement are long past. If you want to hire the best people, which is not easy, then think “situationally”, and you will inspire a more engaged team.

Leading Your Boss
How then do you lead if you are an individual contributor? Well, your one follower might just be yourself and simply being proactive in your life as opposed to being reactive to everyone else. And just because you report to someone, does not mean you cannot lead your boss. More of that should be happening each day. By having a plan for what is important to you in all aspects of your life, then having a dialog and leading your boss on how to optimize all aspects of your life including work is leadership.

Now some of you might be saying, well, that’s great but my boss is not so “enlightened” (or maybe you would use some other expletive). For example, how do you sit down and tell your boss that you are going to turn off your blackberry from 7pm until 7am each day? Well, first off if you have never asked for something, then you know you have no as the answer. So ask. Don’t be afraid. You might actually be positively surprised by their response. Secondly, focus on the objectives for what your boss expects of you and use that as the important measure and tell your boss how you will do it. Thirdly, experiment with different approaches to optimizing all the aspects of your life and how they will fit in with your work. Going back to the example of your blackberry being off from 7pm-7am, tell your boss that if there is ever an emergency, that she can call your cell phone or home number at any time. Otherwise, email will get reviewed first thing in the morning. And if you meet your objectives, then it is a success. And if you don’t meet your objectives, then experiment and try again.

The Hawthorne Effect
Think I am crazy? Ever heard of the Hawthorne Effect?  It is a study done almost a century ago, which simply changed the lighting on a production line and focused on creating a cohesive team. The picture above is from that production line. You might be surprised that not only did raising the lighting levels improve productivity but so did lowering the lights! Why would lowering the lights improve productivity? Probably simply because it showed that management was showing interest (as silly as it sounds) in the team and not treating everyone like a “cog in the wheel”.  Imagine if you did something that really mattered versus simply adjusting the lights?  Elton Mayo, who conducted the studies said this:

So long as commerce specializes in business methods which take no account of human nature and social motives, so long may we expect strikes and sabotage to be the ordinary accompaniment of industry.

Therefore, if your boss still believes in command and control management, well, maybe send them a link to my blog? In all seriousness, don’t give up, experiment and keep working to optimize your life. It may require baby steps, but lead for yourself, for your team, and for your boss and you all might just end up a little bit more successful and happy.

Let me know what you think with a comment. Also, feel free to subscribe to email or via RSS to get an update on future posts. I promise, no spam.

And don’t forget to turn up the lights.

Next up, the importance of love in a startup.

Startup Life 101: The Marathon

Posted by Joseph Ansanelli on Feb 14, 2009 in Execution, Startups, Teams | 4 comments

Being successful in all aspects of your life – your work, your relationships, your community and your personal life – is not easy especially when working at a startup. Conventional wisdom is you have to work 18 hour days, 7 days a week to succeed. Yet maybe it’s not necessarily the best way to succeed?

http://flickr.com/photos/beforethecoffee/

What got me thinking about writing about this was re-connecting with a professor I knew from the Wharton school, Stewart Friedman. He recently wrote a book and teaches a class titled Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life.

I will not do the concepts complete justice but the NY Times summarized his ideas as “Get a Life: 101”. Total Leadership is a process to optimize all parts of your life – yourself, your family, your work and your community – in order to be more successful and ideally more happy.  You do this by clarifying and having a plan for what is important in all the domains of your life (self, family, work and community); you then engage with the people in all those domains and make sure they understand what’s important; and then experiment and figure out what are the ways to achieve the things that matter in all the domains in your life.  You can read more about it on Stew’s blog too.

This past week I presented to one of his classes and this is the first of three posts about applying Total Leadership to startup life.

Marathon
An important first metaphor used by many and important for applying Total Leadership is that a startup is a marathon and not a sprint.

Now, I have never actually run a marathon. I actually only like to run if I am being chased.  But I do like to ride my bike and I (surprise, surprise!) think startup life is a lot more like the Tour De France (surprise, surprise!). The Tour has multiple stages – all challenging in their own way. It’s a race of 2,000 to 2,500 miles happening over 21 days or “stages”.  You start off “easy” riding more than 100 miles a day on flat roads that end in a short sprint, you have mountain stages that climb the highest peaks in the Alps and Pyrenees, you have an individual time trial during which each rider races against the clock, and many other hard rides.  And it also happens to be a team sport. The diversity of challenges and duration certainly compare to a startup.

To win the Tour, one of the first keys to success is having a good plan. I recently wrote about planning in “If you don’t know where you are going, then you’re lost” and won’t repeat that post here. Suffice it to say that by first having a plan for what you need to achieve then, and only then, can you succeed in winning a Tour de France or having a successful life in a startup.

In addition to planning (and having a huge heart, strong legs and massive lungs!), another key ingredient for success in the Tour is setting the right pace.

And that’s startup life too. It’s important to work hard but not work all the time. It’s important to known when to work intensely to achieve a key milestone yet to relax and enjoy success. It’s important to have a pace for your work life that is maintainable and sustainable with the other aspects of your life. And to invest time in yourself and your family. Why? Because if you do not have the right pace and burn out, you will not likely make the best decisions, be the best teammate or team leader, and you will not be prepared to deal with the unplanned challenges that occur all the time. That is true for yourself and for how you act as a leader. By leading with an eye for the long term, you will ensure a more engaged team with lower attrition which makes it more likely the startup will be successful.

This does not mean that startup life is easy. It’s one of the hardest things you can do. But there are things you do which can make it better for yourself and as a leader.

Now many of you are saying it’s impossible! You have to work all the time to be successful in a startup! Rumor has it (Ok, it’s in a blog post on the NY Times) that President Obama played basketball or exercised almost every day on the campaign trail. And today as President he gets up in the morning, spends time with his kids, reads the newspaper and gets to the office (The Oval Office that is!) each morning around 9am. If the President can do that, then “yes you can” too. Oh and for all you Republicans out there, Ronald Reagan was known to do the same thing.

In summary, one of the keys to practicing Total Leadership is that you live your startup life with a plan and with a sustainable, long term pace.

Next up will be a post on the importance of Leadership and why “Total Leadership” is not just a marketing ploy to get people to buy into what might seem like a simple time management philosophy.

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A few golden rules for a great Board relationship

Posted by Joseph Ansanelli on Feb 5, 2009 in Recent, Startups | 7 comments

Working with a Board of Directors can be, well, scary.  Why?  Because they ultimately have the responsibility to hire and fire you.  That’s really one of their only jobs.  You say you don’t have a Board?  A Board might be a group of people or maybe just an individual to whom you are responsible to report on your job results.  If you think about it like that, we all have a Board.  

Many people have asked how I ensured a successful Board relationship at Vontu.  To be honest, I tried to keep it simple and follow a few golden rules:

1. Keep your expectations in check
2. Pick your board wisely
3. Tell them what you are going to do and do it
4. Communicate, communicate and communicate

Keep your expectations in check
After our first round of funding at Connectify, my second startup, I sat down with each of the board members and asked what were their expectations of me and what I should expect of them. The board consisted of two venture capitalists, two outside “operating executives”, one of my co-founders and myself. The most interesting feedback was from one of the investors who said,

If you don’t expect more than money, then you will be happy.

Needless to say, this was a surprise.  I expected to hear how they would help us to recruit the team, find our customers, get publicity, and on and on.  If you read many of the venture capital websites, that is what they promise.  Yet his advice was quite sage because the reality is, especially with investors, they typically have 6-10 (if not more!) investments and are constantly looking for new ones.  The model for venture capital is one of a portfolio of investments in which the few very successful companies deliver the lion share of the investment returns.  And at the end of the day, they are investors relying on you to deliver the results.  Does that mean that they don’t help?  No.  Great board members help but you should expect that the help will be somewhat sporadic and usually only on the really big stuff.  I was lucky to have a great board but at the end of the day, it was my job to deliver the results.

Pick your board wisely
If you are afforded the luxury of being a founder, adding board members is as important as anyone else on your team.  And you should “interview” them and be sure that you are comfortable that you will work well together.  Board dynamics are tough enough without having people whose personalities clash.  If you have the smartest people in the room, but they don’t have the right “relational competencies” (see previous post, It’s the people, stupid part II) then it’s likely the board will be ineffective.  You say you can’t choose your Board?  Well, if your board is your job, then sometimes finding a new job with a great manager is the right answer.  

Additionally, especially for startups, it’s really important to have a balanced board that includes part of the management team, some of the investors (but not all if there are lots of them) and some outside board members.  That way the discussion is balanced across all the constituents.

Tell them what you are going to do, and do it
This is such a simple idea for a successful board relationship.  Actually it’s a great idea for any relationship. Your boss. Your team. Your spouse. Your friends. By setting the right expectations and achieving them, you build trust. If you are a math junkie, its a simple formula:

Success equals Results less Expectations

And to have success, it starts with the Expectations or plan.  As discussed in the post “If you don’t know where you’re going, well, you’re lost“, you should make sure the Board agrees with your Wildly Important Goals and the Objectives for measuring their success.  They can be consulted on the strategy for how you achieve them but that is ultimately your decision.  And try to keep the discussions away from the day to day tactics.  Without an agreed upon set of Wildly Important Goals and Objectives, well, the relationship will likely go awry.

Communicate, communicate and communicate
As in most any relationship, communications is another key ingredient.  For our Board, we established a rhythm of meeting approximately once a month.  During those meetings we would use our Wildly Important Goals and Objectives as the template for how we gave the board updates.  And each person on the executive team would review the results from the previous month focusing on top 3 success and top 3 challenges.  This way the board always knew how we were doing at any given moment.  

This works great for the normal updates, but anything important, typically bad news should be communicated early and often and never wait for a formal meeting.  Bad news early and being honest is always the best policy. I remember when we were about to close a $10 million round of funding and weeks before the contracts were signed and the money was wired, I realized we would both miss our sales targets and we needed to let go of a senior executive.  I could have waited until after we had the money to tell everyone so as not to risk the funding, but that was not the right way to work.  Instead I called the investors, swallowed hard, and told them what was happening.  Maybe not so surprisingly the response was one of support.  Generally the investors said that by being honest about a short term issue and putting the funding at risk, it made them more comfortable to invest.  Granted overall things were going well, but needless to say it made a big impression on the new investors.

In summary, if you keep your expectations low, choose the board thinking about relational competencies, tell them what you are going to do and do it, and constantly communicate, then over time, the board will  develop an ever increasing level of trust. This trust means more focused board meetings, support for management’s decisions, and generally less stress.  And again, these not only work for a “real” board of directors, but for anyone to whom you are responsible for delivering results whether in your job, community or relationships.  

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