eBusiness Weekly
There are a lot of things that can sink a startup. Most of them can be fixed, but by far the hardest to fix is a founder who never grows out of a control freak mentality.
I’ve come to believe that you almost have to be a control freak initially to get a new venture off the ground.
You are doing sales, product development, accounting, strategy, customer support and involved in every aspect of your startup to some degree. People who can take charge, make decisions and move quickly across a multitude of fronts are natural entrepreneurs. This form of leadership can work with a very small team where everyone is in a room together, discussing everything together and the founder can be involved in every decision no matter how minor. The paradox, however, is that those same skills and personality that made the company successful the first year, can become its downfall as the company grows.
Founders who don’t learn how to delegate, assign tasks, distribute resources and trust their people’s decision making, become the anchor that limits the company from growing into the next stage. Their need to be involved in every decision and to control everything leaves them exhausted and their people frustrated and looking for other opportunities. As I’ve told many startup entrepreneurs, when you try to control everything, you actually end up controlling very little.
Actively involved investors and board members do not have to watch this pattern of behaviour play out more than a few times before they learn the signs. The company’s growth plateaus. There is a lot of employee turnover. The founder looks exhausted and constantly complains of not having enough time to “do everything”. The founder often does not want to implement a 360 review that we request because he or she knows that the feedback will be negative. If you participate in some exit interviews, most departing employees will tell you that the founder is the bottleneck.
“No one can make a decision unless the founder is in the meeting.”
Those who take initiative are reprimanded for acting “out of turn”. Basically, the control freak micro-managing founder has created a culture that kills creativity and initiative. The employees do not feel empowered and the energy of the team is slowly drained away because everyone on the team is relegated to no more than an “errand boy” to the founder.
Some control freak founders can be coached through this. The ones that are smart and have a strong self-esteem are the most coachable. They sense that something is wrong and they are willing to do whatever it takes to fix the problem. They learn to establish manager domain fiefdoms with well-defined resources and authority latitude within reasonable thresholds. They learn to establish clear goals without dictating tactics.
They come to realise that unless their managers are empowered to establish their own tactics then they cannot be held accountable for the outcomes and they certainly won’t take ownership of anything. They learn to respect a chain of command and avoid assigning tasks to a manager’s direct reports so as not to circumvent that manager’s authority.
Unfortunately, some control freak founders just can’t make this transition no matter how many coaches we provide. They cling desperately to the belief that if they just work a little harder then everything will eventually work out. They can’t seem to fathom that just because something worked OK in the past, it may not be the right tool for a different stage of the company’s growth. They assume that since they have not changed then the new lack of success must be the fault of others. They often blame their employees, co-founders, advisors, board of directors or all of them at once.
In this sad situation, the only path forward for the company and its stakeholders is to try to transition the control freak founder to a position within the company that utilises his or her strengths while leading a smaller team.
Sometimes reporting to a seasoned leader provides them with the role model and example that they may not yet have experienced in their career. I’ve had some control freak founders tell me a few months after a painful transition that they now understood why that transition had to be made and that they have come to believe that they and their venture are better off for it.
Unfortunately, we’ve also had a couple that just never figured it out to the detriment of their venture, employees, investors and even their own self-interest.
It’s never too late for a control freak entrepreneur to learn leadership. Books and podcasts are full of examples of great entrepreneurs who started out as control freaks, but eventually learned to lead and went on to found and grow great companies or even return to their original one and lead it to unimaginable new heights. — TechWire.
