This week's Startup Camp included a lively session on 'leadership hacks' moderated by Technorati founder Dave Sifry. The top three hacks? Plan for mistakes, focus on your team, and set expectations.
Plan for mistakes
Sifry exhorted would-be founders to "never fear mistakes!"
- Make mistakes, and plan for how you'll learn from them.
- Leaders should pattern match - which means that you must periodically step above your daily involvement, and look for patterns in the mistakes that are being made.
- Remember to plan for success also, since many mistakes emerge from wild growth as well as from dismal failure.
- Use mistakes to inform discussions of what you can do. Dwelling on what you can't do is wasted time.
Focus on your team
Plan your culture and support your team proactively. Where do you want to work, and who with, for the next ten years? (Again, plan for success.)
- Optimize the needs of the company against the needs of the individual. Balance what the company needs someone to do, what he or she is good at, and how he or she would like to grow/stretch. This requires emotional intelligence, but you'll be more successful once you are aware of your team's motivations, strengths, and weaknesses.
- Set your core values early, and adhere to them in hiring. For example, are you building a missionary or a mercenary culture? You can't teach core values - people either subscribe to them, or they don't.
- Support learning and adaptability, and look for potential as well as experience.
- You're replacing yourself when you create a new, full-time role. Always hire someone better at that job than you were, and give them ownership.
Set expectations
Talk early and often with your investment partners. Get investors that you can communicate with on everything - the good, the bad, and the ugly - and feel secure in knowing that you're on the same side and share the same goals.
- Know your passion and your strengths. If your company's success means that it outgrows you (and you should hope it does), what is the best contribution that you could continue making?
- Be up front with your expected participation by investors, and assure that everyone's expectations are aligned. If the desired participation level is not a match, finding out early means that you can walk away friends before consummating a bad deal.
- Be honest. Before people buy into your vision, they will buy into you. People smell bull coming from a mile away.
