Entrepreneurship is a team sport. That means that one of the most important responsibilities of a founder is to attract people to the venture and get them aligned and working together towards a common vision. I like to think about this in terms of concentric circles of people (see here for more detail).
One of the most important Circles is your Leadership Circle. The interpersonal dynamics of your Leadership Circle are one of the most important aspects of startup success and one of the few for which a founder is singularly responsible.
People being people, disagreements within teams are not only inevitable but healthy. In fact, the best Leadership Circles can generate better decisions and teamwork BECAUSE people have different points of view. But cultivating that kind of environment takes a deliberate and conscious effort by a Founder.
Three key ingredients of a successful Leadership Circle
A mix of skills and perspectives
Ideally each member of a Leadership Circle should be “smarter” than the founder in their area of expertise, or have the ambition and potential and sense of accountability to grow into the role. The members in a Leadership Circle should be able to cover all the functional responsibilities needed for a particular venture at its level of maturity without too much overlap or missing skillsets.
A shared commitment to the success of the venture.
In business, a shared commitment to success should serve as the basis for everyone’s Why I’m Here. This should take the form of a sincere and conscious collective recognition that if the venture succeeds, so do the customers, and the team, and each individual on the team. Only through shared success can any individual succeed. There should be no such belief that individual success can come at the expense of the rest.
Real interpersonal trust.
The most important requirement for a Leadershipo Team is the ability to act as a team. Since no one can do it all themselves, the job of the team is to unleash each team member’s strengths and shore up eberyone’s weaknesses. Collectively this is the basis for the learning, collaboration, and good decisionmaking that will be required to shepherd a venture through its challenges and reach its full potential.
In my experience as a founder, executive, advisor, and student of startups, good Leadership Circles mean good startups. Full stop. No matter how smart any individual on a team may be, they are never as smart as they are when working on a well-functioning team. Team members more committed to their personal success than their collective success are bad medicine.
Good Leadership Circles allow for the contribution of facts, experience, judgement, and opinion from multiple points of view. They make better decisions because they increase the number of creative ideas to solve problems, reveal flaws in logic or gaps in data, and decrease the likelihood of groupthink, myoppia, or ignorance. In the absence of a good Leadership Circle, bad decisions are all but certain.
Managing disagreement in a Leadership Circle
Even with a good team around you, being a founder is hard. The weight of responsibility and accountability that comes with the role is a burden not easy to bear. It would be nice to imagine that founders could be professional, rational, and balanced all the time, never letting their judgement or behavior be clouded by emotion. But they’re human and that’s pretty much impossible. How a founder interacts with their Leadership Team in the face of such human emotions can make or break a startup.
Five tips for Founders managing disagreement
- When someone in your Leadership Circle disagrees with your opinion it should not be considered a challenge to your authority.
- When someone in your Leadership Circle gives you input, feedback, facts or advice that contradict your beliefs or understanding, it should not be considered a challenge to your authority.
- When someone in your Leadership Circle disagrees with a decision before it’s made, it should not be considered a challenge to your authority.
- When someone in your Leadership Circle disagrees with a decision after it’s made – in private or in a meeting with leadership team members – it should not be considered a challenge to your authority.
- When someone in your Leadership Circle gives you input, feedback, facts or advice in a way that strikes you as condescending, arrogant, petty, or emotionally charged, it should not be considered a challenge to your authority.*
* It SHOULD be treated as a behavior that erodes trust in both directions and addressed with the intent of increasing that trust and minimizing misunderstanding in the future. See below.
In short, disagreement among your team is not a challenge to your authority. It’s the REASON you have a team.
Is disagreement really a “challenge to authority?”
I hear this all the time from leaders when they encounter disagreement from their colleagues: “that statement was illegitimate/out-of-line/inappropriate because it represented a challenge to my authority.”
But what does that really mean? As a founder or CEO, your authority is based on your job function, which is granted by the board and/or the shareholders. If you’re a founder, your authority can almost certainly not be revoked by someone in your Leadership Circle, no matter how vehemently they may disagree with your decisions or conduct. Importantly, a disagreement from a colleague is almost never intended to result in the revocation of your role.
So don’t worry: disagreements from your team is almost never an actual “challenge to your authority.”
Instead, this term is actually a euphemism leaders use in place of “that comment made me feel uncomfortable, uninformed, incompetent, or unqualified.”
Or, more accurately, “that comment challenged my ego.” And THAT is something worth exploring.
Ego challenges
All leaders face ego challenges on the regular, mostly from directions over which they have little control: the market, customers, competition, investors, family, internal insecurities, (and many many others). It can and does make a leader question themselves, their abilities, and the future.
But when an ego challenge comes from a person over whom a leader has defacto authority, it is tempting – and common – to utilize that authority to make the challenge go away … and then rationalize that action to make it seem less emotional or capricious. In other words, if you have no control over most ego challenges, it’s really tempting to take action over the ones you CAN control.
To be very clear, the WAY disagreement is delivered can have a significant impact on how it is received by a leader. Emotional, personal, disrespectful, or dishonest tones make it harder for any human to discern any legitimacy or validity behind the words.
Further, WHERE disagreement is delivered can also have an impact. A sarcastic comment or criticism of the leader delivered by a colleague in front of a company’s staff always has a deleterious effect on the broader company. Whether the substance of the disagreement is legitimate or not, overt conflict among senior colleagues suggests that leadership is divided or dysfunctional, which means confusion and a lack of confidence among your broader team regardless of the substance of the issue. Since the responsibility for harmony among leadership falls to the founder, they are perceived as responsible if the team is not aligned. And correctly so.
The temptation of the smackdown
It is tempting under these kinds of circumstances to take umbrage and lash out emotionally at the source of the disagreement. The mature leader may choose to respond in private, but the response is the same. Being human, many leaders find it difficult to square the emotional nature of their reaction with their belief that they should NOT behave emotionally, often rationalizing their negative emotional reactions to themselves and other with what seem like less emotional explanations:
- “We don’t have time to argue or debate. We have to make decisions.”
- “Re-litigating decisions made in the past is inefficient / counterproductive.”
- “I don’t have time to explain myself.”
- “That person doesn’t have the information I do.”
- “That person’s perspective is limited.”
- “That person is just wrong.”
When scrutinized in any detail, most of these rationalizations fall apart pretty quickly. Going back to the requirements of a Leadership Circle: if a mix of skills and perspectives from trusted colleagues committed to the venture’s success is necessary for effective decisionmaking, leadership circles should WANT good faith disagreement – even conflict – in order to improve the quality of those decisions.
Red teaming important decisions
For generations, the most experienced and high-stakes organizations (like the United States and Israeli militaries) have recognized the inherent tendency of teams towards groupthink and dysfunction and deliberately instituted “red teams” whose purpose was to assume a contrarian stance so that flaws in an organization’s thinking could be exposed. Teams should be encouraged to gather broad levels of information and points of view, think critically and question each other, in order to winnow out bad reasoning and groupthink. A team that never disagrees is almost guaranteed to miss something. (Even with an aligned, diverse, and trusting Leadership Circle, if disagreement still exists after discussion, not enough work has been done to share information, harmonize divergent points of view, or gain tacit support for a decision.)
Far worse than a team that never disagrees, however, is the team that is AFRAID to disagree. A team is where members believe that they “should not say things out loud that the leader might disagree with” is the definition of dysfunctional, and a dysfunctional team makes bad decisions and can doom the success of any venture.
And this is where the founder’s reactions to ego challenges matter greatly.
How to handle ego challenges as a leader
If one starts with the perspective that the PURPOSE of a team is to expose disagreements and work to resolve them, it should be easier to accommodate statements or comments with which you disagree. But that still doesn’t mean every reaction is equal, especially if your ego is feeling challenged. If it was legitimately offered, how you respond is vital.
Here are a few questions to ask when you find your ego challenged by a statement from a colleague:
- Did the person offer their input in good faith, with the good of the organization in mind?
- Did the person intend to insult or denigrate you?
- Did the person offer their input in the right context (publicly in a measured way, or privately if critical)?
- Did the person explain their position rationally? If not, did you ask them to do so and did they respond?
If the answer to all of these questions was yes, consider strongly if your reaction is an ego challenge based on doubt or insecurity or frustration or anxiety, rather than a “challenge to your authority.”
How to avoid decisions that erode trust
One major responsibility of a founder/leader is to make decisions. But given that it is equally critical it is to cultivate a Leadership Circle based on trust, the WAY you make decisions can have a serious negative impact. Here are a few problematic decisionmaking habits to avoid:
- making an important decision without input from anyone in your Leadership Circle
- making an important decision with input from a single individual or a small group without broader discussion among your Leadership Circle
- ignoring disagreements offered by your Leadership Circle in good faith
- treating disagreements from your Leadership Circle dismissively
- making a decision based on your defacto authority without explanation
- making a decision that directly contradicts a team member’s input or recommendation without explanation
Whether the decision is right or wrong, all of these behaviors erode trust.
How to make decisions that enhance trust
Expecting full good faith, informed agreement among your Leadership Circle prior to making a decision is unlikely. Equally unlikely is achieving consensus on every decision. In general, however, taking the time to discuss decisions is almost always worth it, and is more worth it when teams are new and trust is still being established.
- When in doubt, bring a decision to the Leadership Circle before making it.
- Take the time to allow and encourage disagreement and discussion.
- Take time to find consensus if possible.
When disagreement emerges,
- Understand how passionately people feel about their position. The more passionate, the more effort needs to be put into resolving or harmonizing support before making a decision.
- Be sure the reasons for disagreement are articulated in the context of the company’s best interest
- Be sure that the risk (not just the possibility) of a bad outcome is part of the discussion
- Don’t shy away from the expression of emotional reasons for disagreement
- Don’t be afraid to acquiesce to a decision you don’t personally agree with, especially if the worst case outcome is not fatal. (100% buy in on an 80% idea is preferable to the inverse.”)
- Don’t be afraid to compromise, especially on decisions that are not existential in nature
- Don’t be afraid to accept a specialist’s recommendation on a subject that pertains to their area of expertise, especially on decisions that are not existential in nature
If the stakes around a decision are high, adequate good faith debate has occurred, and consensus is still not achieved, don’t be afraid to ask your Circle to “disagree and commit.”
In summary
[Illustration prompt: illustration of a startup team playing softball in a park, six people, women, men, older, younger, different races, David Finch’s Art Style. No beards. Competitive expressions. No smiles.]
Management – and entrepreneurship in particular- is a team sport. The consideration of facts, experience, judgement, and opinion from multiple points of view almost always makes the difference between good decisions and bad ones. A Leadership Circle where members believe that they “should not say things out loud that the leader might disagree with” is the definition of a dysfunctional.
Hearing contradictory input can be emotionally difficult. Treating people you disagree with respectfully can be emotionally difficult. Hearing challenges to your ideas and decisions can be emotionally difficult. Taking time to build trust and collective agreement on important decisions can be emotionally difficult.
A leader’s role on a team is to make decisions, but it’s also to make GOOD ones – and making good decisions requires a team with a mix of skills and perspectives, a shared commitment to the success of the venture, and a high level of interpersonal trust.
The good news? If you make building a quality Leadership Circle a priority, decisionmaking gets easier and better over time.
