This week we're excited to share a brand new blog post, guest-written by the Head of People and Culture at Joint Academy, Sara Stjernquist. Sara outlines some common challenges that leadership teams at fast-growth companies face, and offers her tips on how to proactively avoid them.
Being a leader in a start-up or scale-up brings a number of unique challenges to the leadership. This is not only due to constant, rapid change, but also due to the fact that your ability to hire, communicate and trust others will have a massive impact on how likely your company is to succeed over time.
Here are a few things that leaders of fast-growth businesses should be extra tentative about.
The changing nature of leadership
There is no such thing as one successful leadership attribute, particularly in a start-up or scale-up environment.
Founders or leaders at small startups have to be both the strategist and the executor, the expert and the generalist. To succeed you need to get the most out of yourself. But as soon as the company grows, you need to ensure that you have the ability to get the best out of other people - creating an environment for others to succeed.
The art of delegating
The ability to delegate responsibilities and decisions is a very important, yet very tricky, part of entrepreneurship. This transition is often hard. If it’s done right, the whole organisation will end up being more healthy and more productive but many entrepreneurs that I’ve met struggle with delegating and letting go of control.
As a business grows, leaders can no longer be involved in everything. If they are then decision making quickly becomes a bottleneck which will slow the rest of the business down. Staying on top of everything also increases the risk of getting stuck in micromanagement, which most people dread.
Not allowing the people you just hired to deliver on their full potential will make people more passive and they’ll experience a lack of trust that can cause frustration to grow and motivation to drop.
Affinity bias causing diversity debt
Delegating is hard because it means letting go of control. For many founders, their business is their “baby” and they naturally want to do everything in their power to make it succeed. Letting go of control is often easier said than done and it may be less scary to drop control if you hand it over to people who you can relate to and who share the same attributes as yourself. This is a natural instinct, because your brain sees them as familiar and relatable, which is also known as “affinity bias”.
This subconscious gravitation towards people who we feel are similar to ourselves, and the fact that start-ups tend to rely heavily on internal referrals often creates a homogen core group in the company and that “diversity debt” can be difficult to break.
Blocking your ability to grow
To be honest, most start-ups and leadership teams that I worked with have had diversity & inclusion (D&I) as a low priority, at least in the early stages. There are always more pressing matters to deal with. But more and more we are seeing D&I being viewed as key success indicators and metrics that are of increased importance. Therefore prioritising D&I at an early stage may not just boost innovation and a diversity of ideas and perspectives, it can also make you a more attractive workplace and help secure future investment.
We’re seeing investment companies stepping up their commitment towards D&I as they only consider making follow-on investments in companies that they believe have made progress in relation to D&I.
And let’s not forget your ability to recruit. A clear majority of candidates say that D&I is an important factor in their decision to accept a job offer. And they will quickly notice whether those are empty buzzwords or a true value base once they’re in.
How to avoid some of the pitfalls;
- Widen your network for early hires. Look outside of your group of closest friends, former classmates and old colleagues. It may well be worth the investment to seek out external recruiting/sourcing support to build a more diverse pool of candidates for the first people you are looking at bringing into your team.
- Try to be honest with yourself in identifying your own strengths and shortcomings. You should then actively try to find people who bring other strengths and perspectives as early as possible in the company’s journey. This will ultimately make you a more attractive place to work.
- Be attentive to your ability to delegate and your own tendencies to micromanage. Keep an eye on how frequently you request ad hoc updates from your team and the level of detail you’re controlling.
- Demonstrate transparency and keep as much data and communication as possible in open dashboards and channels instead of locked data rooms, private messages and closed groups.
- Make diversity, inclusion and belonging early priorities. Even if you don’t care personally, others will.
To hear more from Sara, please listen to the "Agile Leadership" episode of our Leading Between the Lines podcast. In this episode, from November 2021, Sara tells us how she operates within her current role and discusses her plans for the future, explaining what she feels are the most important things to keep hold of as a company grows.
Working specifically with fast-growth organisations, we offer specialist coaching and development programmes, together with assessment and selection centres, designed and facilitated by experienced and qualified coaches. If you would like to find out more about how we can help your company and workforce grow, why not request a free consultancy call?
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