Category: Leadership

Continuing with yesterday’s post on the book The Secret by Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller, there were a number of good discussion questions as part of leadership development. While there were too many to list here I wanted to capture some of the key ones.

Here are some leadership development questions from The Secret:

• What is the purpose of your team?
• How can you communicate your vision of the future to your team?
• What are ten specific things you could do to engage individuals more effectively in the work of the team and the organization?
• How are you encouraging the development of your people?
• What systems or processes in your area of responsibility need to be changed to enhance performance?
• How could the areas under your leadership be structured differently to enhance performance?
• How many of your people would say that you have made a significant investment in their lives?
• What are the ways you have expressed appreciation for work well done in the last thirty days?
• What do I want to be true in the future that is not true today?

These are great discussion questions for peer-to-peer learning as well as mentoring sessions.

What else? What are some other good leadership development questions?

This weekend I finished reading the short book titled The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do by Ken Blanchard (of The One Minute Manager fame) and Mark Miller (a VP at Chick-fil-A). Much like the Patrick Lencioni books, it’s told as a fable with the main character going through a leadership mentoring program with an executive at her company. The main takeaway from the book is that leadership is about serving others (servant leadership) combined with the following SERVE acronym:

• See the Future (vision)
• Engage and Develop Others (mentoring and training)
• Reinvent Continuously (try new ideas)
• Value Results and Relationships (metrics and people)
• Embody the Values (culture starts with you)

Forcing each of the items into the SERVE acronym was a bit of a stretch but the core concepts are sound. Leadership, just like any other skill, needs constant work, practice, and development.

What else? What did you think of the leadership book The Secret?

Hiring an executive is hard in any business, especially startups. In startups, the speed and execution of the organization is so critical to success that a poor executive hire can sink the ship. When hiring an executive it’s important to consider different applicable traits and articulate internally what’s most important for the startup’s current stage (e.g. the team at $1M in revenue isn’t necessarily the same team at $20M in revenue).

Here are some executive considerations when hiring:

• Manager – does this person need to manage a team, like a VP of Engineering, or be more of a chief scientist like a CTO?
• Doer – especially in earlier stages, executives need to roll up their sleeves and do some front-line work. If this is a significant part of the job, it’s important to make sure the person likes to do individual projects in addition to managing.
• Planner – planning takes many forms. Do they need to do quarterly and annual goals? What about budgets?
• Strategic thinker – some roles are more for thought leadership and public speaking (e.g. the visionary type). The best managers aren’t always the best strategic thinkers.

Of course, a strong corporate culture fit is first and foremost with any hire. Assuming corporate culture fit is in place, it’s important to think through these considerations when hiring an executive in a startup.

What else? What are some other executive hire considerations in a startup?

When meeting with an entrepreneur one of the questions I like to ask early in the conversation is “What outcome do you want from this meeting?” With so many different topics covered in a typical startup-oriented conversation, there’s a tendency to share useful information but not necessarily spend enough time on the most pressing items.

Here are some of the more common meeting outcome requests:

• Feedback on the idea/concept
• Introductions to investors, partners, and people that can potentially help
• Resources like books and blogs to solve specific problems or better address potential opportunities
• Analysis of a specific issue

The next time you’re in a meeting, be straightforward and ask the question “what outcome do you want from this meeting?” You’ll be able to spend more time on the key issues and get more value from the conversation.

What else? What other general questions do you commonly ask in a conversation?

With a small, agile team there usually aren’t too many people to get on board with a decision. The ability to move quickly in a startup is critical, and team members need to be on board. In fact, fast decision making is one of the main reasons startups beat larger, more well-funded competitors. Two of the most common decision making approaches in startups are consensus and leader-led.

In a consensus process the leader works with the team members both individually and as a group to see how each person feels about a potential decision. The decision to move forward is only made with everyone in agreement, requiring more time and energy to reach an agreement. John D. Rockefeller was famous for requiring consensus from his management team before doing an intitiative.

In a leader-led process the leader works to get everyone to voice his or her opinion so that their choice and reasoning is well understood. After getting everyone’s opinion, and talking through things, the leader makes the decision that he/she believes best, even if it isn’t consensus. Because everyone has voiced their opinion and contributed to the process, they are more bought into the decision even if it isn’t the direction they wanted.

There’s no right or wrong approach in a startup but it is important for leaders to understand their personal style, as well as the magnitude of the decision, and to decide the best course of action.

What else? What style do you prefer and why?

Every day we do a bottom-up daily scrum. Every person in the company participates in one or more daily scrums so that there’s an effortless flow of information. We believe that staying closest to the customer and having the shortest feedback loop to make decisions provides us a competitive advantage. The daily scrum allows us to do just that.

Here’s how the daily startup scrum works:

• 9:30 – 9:40 manager with team members
• 9:40 – 9:50 C-level with managers
• 9:50 – 10 CEO and C-level execs

We answer three simple questions: What did you accomplish yesterday, what are you going to accomplish today, and do you have any roadblocks? This daily scrum makes it so that everyone knows the top three key items for each person in daily chunks allowing up to make decisions quickly and execute fast.

What else? What are your thoughts on doing a daily scrum?

A couple weeks ago I was talking to a friend who had entered a dip in his startup. Dips are when you’ve been working hard at something for a period of time and it is getting especially tough where you have to decide if you’re going to give up or continue on. These are often very tough times. Startups are a marathon and not a sprint, so it is important to continually remind yourself of that.

Here are some tips for the startup marathon:

• Reflect daily and weekly on your small and large victories so that progress is recorded
• When you’re in a dip recognize it as such and seek peer-to-peer feedback through a group like Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
• Take personal time and enjoy life knowing that you’re in the startup marathon and need to pace yourself

Startups are a marathon and need to be treated as such.

What else? What are some other tips to help complete the startup marathon?