Startup Life 102: Leadership
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
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.
I definitely agree with this post that you have to manage situationally as everyone responds differently. As you think about motivation and leadership, here’s a great blog post http://sparxoo.com/?p=286 that discusses different approaches to motivation.
Great post and examples. Big fan of Steve Jobs stanford graduation speech. The next post will talk about this more as well. Thanks for the comments.