Starting and running a company is a team effort. Yes, it takes a leader (entrepreneur), but you can’t do it alone, without a team. Maybe only you and a co-founder comprise the team at first, to provide key skills, back you up, and test your ideas. As the startup grows, the team has to be able to really push you in making growth decisions, rather than you pulling them along.
The responsibility for leadership rests on you as the founder or CEO, and your leadership style. Many entrepreneurs still fall back to the traditional “control” leadership paradigm, but I don’t see it working so well any more. I agree more with Dr. Roger Schwarz and his classic book, “Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams.” He outlines eight keys to an effective mutual learning approach as follows:
- State views and ask genuine questions. When you state your views and ask genuine questions, you are convincingly open and curious. Understand that curiosity doesn’t mean agreement, and all questions are not genuine. Recognize that rhetorical questions seek to make a point or make people do something, not come up with a real answer.
- Share all relevant information. All team members need all the right information, before they can make, understand, and implement forward-looking decisions. That means sharing timely information that doesn’t always support your view, or might upset others. You should disclose your feelings, and any limiting factors like privacy or legality.
- Use specific examples and agree on what important words mean. If you hear someone on the team using a word or term that you think is unclear to others, ask for a specific example. This usually requires naming real names, rather than “someone,” and asking what you really want to know, without generalizing the question.
- Explain reasoning and intent. Teams are hardwired to make meaning out of problems. When you share your reasoning and intent, you reduce the need for others to figure out reasons, or assume something is being withheld. Start every meeting with one or two sentences that explain what you want to talk about and why.
- Focus on interests, not positions. Positions represent specific solutions from a given team member, whereas interests are the underlying needs that drive people to their position. You need a decision that meets all key interests, in order to get total commitment to the best solution from the team.
- Test assumptions and inferences. Assumptions are conclusions with no information. Inferences are conclusions about things you don’t know based on things you do know. Avoid assumptions, and test every inference by checking it against behavior confirmed by someone else. Untested inferences are among the main reasons a team gets stuck.
- Jointly design next steps. When you jointly design next steps, you design them with others instead of for others. It increases the chance that you will get a genuinely workable solution and that the team will be committed to implementing it. Keep in mind that joint design doesn’t mean that you give up your prerogative of making the final decision..
- Discuss un-discussable issues. These are topics relevant to a solution that team members won’t address in the team, due to fear or compassion. Examples include disruptive actions of a team member or a boss. Leaders may start the discussion outside, but must address it, with respect, inside the team for mutual learning and resolution.
Where you as the leader may be part of the problem in the mutual learning process, it may be necessary to ask a third party inside the organization, or a consultant from outside the organization to facilitate the transformation, or the resolution of a tough change issue. True leaders know how to move out of the way to let others do what they do best.
The results are improved performance, stronger working relationships, and greater well-being for you, your team, and your company. In the long run, every entrepreneur needs to remember that it’s the team, with their broader range of skills and experience, that builds the leader’s success – and not the other way around. This rarely happens with total control leadership.
