"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved" - Helen Keller
How should start-ups forge leaders? What is a good leadership framework for start-ups? Are there some universal competencies that leaders in start-ups need to demonstrate? — We have been grappling with these are questions for over a decade. People in start-ups are starved for bandwidth and time. Putting them through traditional development programs, like the way large and mature companies do, simply doesn’t work. Therefore, the fundamental design feature of a leadership model for a start-up should involve building leadership capability on the job. One can argue that this is true for mature companies as well. Yes, of course it is true. The only difference is that in mature companies, people are not so constrained for time and these companies can afford to put their people through other fancy interventions, whose outcomes and effectiveness have always been under question. Fancy interventions in large companies have become a ritual and start-ups can do without them.
Leaders are forged through tough experiences. Leaders are shaped by other leaders. This is true in companies as much as in real life.
If you speak to anyone about what has been the biggest influence in their lives or what helped them to get to where they are, very few are likely to say that it was some training program they attended or a certification they acquired. Almost everyone will tell you that it was an individual they worked with closely (either in a professional or a personal capacity) or a real-life experience they went through (either on the job or in their personal lives). Leaders are forged through tough experiences. Leaders are shaped by other leaders. This is true in companies as much as in real life. Some situations make men out of boys or women out of girls. Life presents these situations to individuals mostly by accident and, when presented with these situations, individuals often curse their misfortune. However, after going through these successfully, they figure out that they are much stronger after the experience and better equipped to deal with similar situations in the future. In some parts of the world, this is also referred to as the ‘School of Hard Knocks’! Good companies create tough learning experiences by design. Let us recount specific examples:
- In one of the companies that one of us worked for, the Monthly Review Meeting (MRM) was a forum for forging leaders. The MRM could be pretty intimidating if you were attending it for the first time. The questioning was brutal, there was no mincing of words and no room for niceties and the orientation towards facts and data was unrelenting. You had to hold your ground and fight back with your own point of view. Disagreements were respected (and the respect was multiplied manifold if you could substantiate your point of view with data, facts or insight) and mute acceptance evoked disgust. If you survived six of these in a row, you could write a new CV. You learnt to develop a point of view and defend it. You learned how to handle three questions that haunt everyone: ‘So what?’, ‘Why?’ and ‘What if?’ You learnt problem-solving. You learnt to handle aggressive environments. You developed internal customer orientation. No amount of classroom training in a leadership institute at a beautiful locale can ever substitute for this. In addition to shaping and forging leaders, these are great forums to spot potential leaders. Hence, succession planning and internal deployment on key projects become much more objective and unbiased.
- In addition, the way these MRMs were structured helped spot talent. The executive team sat through the full review. Each member had to present how her business or function did in the month that just went by. Each member was accompanied by her team during her presentation, after which the team left but the concerned executive team member stayed on. This was a great opportunity for the executive team to observe individuals that they would otherwise never get to see in action. They could see how they responded to difficult questions, check out their depth and clarity, their customer centricity, their ability to communicate and influence, etc. An unconscious consensus got built in the minds of the executive team on the capabilities of the next line of leadership. This helped in smooth succession planning.
- In some other companies, we have seen leaders being encouraged to invite some of their first-line or second-line team members, who are not directly involved with the issue under discussion, to meetings and reviews. These individuals are invited to sit through these meetings to observe and learn how disagreements are resolved, how consensus is built, how choices are made, how problems are solved, how execution issues are foreseen and addressed, how plans are made and communicated, etc. All these skills can be learnt by seeing people demonstrate them in a live setting and relevant context. Quite frankly, you could judge a leader by the competence of her team, which was now visible to others. Some leaders were lone wolves. They turned up alone for most meetings. Some of them were even brilliant and knew every detail, but one never knew who operated behind the scenes in their teams — who were the numbers guys, who created the beautiful decks or who put together those wonderful insights. One tended to be suspicious of the reality and durability of the strength of the teams that such leaders led.
- We have also seen companies place calculated bets and give difficult roles to people who demonstrated potential. Potential is assessed based on how this individual comes across in some of these intense forums like the MRMs. The manager is not left to be the sole judge of potential. This individual is then provided with some initial support and sponsorship during her teething period. The learning that this individual goes through and the character she develops as a result of being thrown in at the deep end (with some support) can never be substituted by any leadership development program.
- The last tool for forging leaders is setting stretch goals and allowing them the freedom to imagine how they could be met. Tough goals and stretch assignments are mechanisms to throw people in at the deep end and see how they manage. Some of the leaders that we saw were very good at this — they pushed their people hard right to the brink, providing just enough support to prevent them from toppling over. Individuals who went through these successfully soon shaped up into seasoned leaders. The beauty of this is that if you do this, the individuals concerned would nominate themselves for the right kind of leadership programs and show serious interest in learning some of the leadership techniques and frameworks that these programs intend to impart!
We are great fans of the 70:20:10 model for creating leadership capability, which essentially says that 70 per cent of learning and character-building comes from tough assignments and difficult situations, 20 per cent from insightful conversations and straight talk (mostly with your manager) and only 10 per cent through classroom training. Some managers leverage this model unconsciously for forging leaders. Equipping them with a toolkit on how to go about this more systematically helps them hone their skills. Managers who leverage this are good at straight talk and having insightful conversations. Incidentally, these are precisely the managers who thrive in a start-up.
The learning that an individual goes through as a result of being thrown in at the deep end (with some support) can never be substituted by any leadership development program.
We decided to take the 70:20:10 model a step further, which is really about making this model work on the ground. To begin with, we spoke to at least fifty successful start-up leaders to identify some great performers in their teams and contrast them with the poor performers. We then asked them to tell us the behaviors that their best performers consistently demonstrated. We discovered that these were precisely the behaviors that poor performers failed to demonstrate (or demonstrated inconsistently). There were at least fifty or sixty such behaviors that emerged. When we read through the notes in some detail, we noticed that all of them could be clubbed into just six competencies! We then put together a simple toolkit that managers could use to drive the two pieces of the 70:20:10 model. The toolkit comprises (a) behavioral descriptors of these six competencies, and (b) simple and practical actions that managers could take to help them address these gaps.
We believe that if managers follow these simple steps, there will be a significant improvement in the competence of their one-downs, and there can be no better way of forging leaders than this. Standard practices for leadership building do not work in start-ups. Even in large organizations, the impact of these is marginal. Frankly, the traditional model is being questioned even in large companies, especially those that are under severe cost pressure. It is interesting how these companies are suddenly realizing that what they were doing earlier wasn’t effective — difficult times can induce clear thinking and are great at separating the real value- adding activities from fluff!
(This article is sourced from the book: “Cut the Crap and Jargon – Lessons from the Startup Trenches” by Hari TN and Shradha Sharma)