Flat, Inspired, and Accountable… How to Lead at the Start
Written by: Steen Nissen, Former CEO of Applied Biomimetic
In a diverse startup company you are depending on every team member being prepared to “go the extra mile” and you, as the leader, need to get your staff motivated to do just this – the question is how?
Having been CEO of a startup company, with at times eight different nationalities, it became especially important to create a company culture that promoted performance and behaviors that supported the company’s vision and goals regardless of the individual differences. Diversity is certainly a benefit as it provides multiple insights and perspectives on everything but it also creates a demand of you as the leader and manager to find a way to move everyone forward as one team.
Being a Dane, for me it starts with a Scandinavian style of leadership. This type of leadership is highly valued in Denmark/Scandinavia and is characterized by a high level of empowerment, trust, freedom under responsibility, management accessibility, engagement, being casual/informal, and even though there of course is an organizational structure and hierarchy in place, it feels very flat.
The approach is generally more value based than rules based. This is not to be understood that rules and guidelines don’t need to be outlined, both in terms of specific job descriptions or an employee handbook, it just says something about how many details need to be defined, e.g. how to track sick days or office hours.
It is imperative that employees are given both the freedom and the obligation to define their roles and give them room to grow by allowing people to make mistakes. You want to create an environment and a clear expectation that if an employee sees a need or unmet potential that they take initiative and independently take responsibility to get it fulfilled.
The communication is open and direct between employees and managers on all levels. As a leader it is about being visible and about listening, and sometimes decision processes can be time consuming as a result of that, but the upside is that the process typically leads to better anchored decisions and stronger results in the end. However, that said, despite the open-door policy there also needs to be an implicit understanding that just because you got heard, it is not the same as you being right or your suggestion getting implemented.
Lastly, it also means focusing on strong and sustainable results, and creating value for the stakeholders, including your ownership but also your customers, vendors, and other partners.
If you create the right environment and hire the right people, you build a very strong culture and some very capable and resilient employees. In a technology startup, you hire highly educated and skilled people. They all have the potential to succeed, otherwise I hired the wrong people. My job is then to maximize their potential and to get the most out of them as possible, not just individually but as a team - and if they succeed, the company succeeds, and then I have ultimately succeeded as a leader.
Delegate, build people, put them out on deep water with tasks that they are not necessarily skilled or experienced to perform – but give them the freedom and the support to solve and deliver, and you will see people grow fast. Be prepared to also “pick them up” if they fail, but allow for it to be a learning experience. It is really about freedom under responsibility – you need to trust people to live up to that “contract”, but people also need to understand the consequences if that trust is broken.
As a leader, you need to know your staff and, like any manager, you need to set the tone for the organization. It is not about creating consensus but about motivation and creating an environment where people feel they got heard even though they do not necessarily agree with a particular decision. As a leader, you need to be confident in your own abilities and the goals you have set out for the organization. It is crucial that you are completely clear on what type of person would fit into your company culture and you need to be prepared to take the consequences if people do not fit into this culture. Some people simply prefer a more structured environment.
Note, this is not necessarily a management style that fits all businesses or any business all the time. However, in the long run, I believe you will have much more motivated people, and thus a stronger organization if you follow this approach. When you build trust, when you challenge every person in the company to deliver against their personal potential, and hold all, including yourself, accountable, the results can be simply stunning.
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