Are You Persona Non-Grata in Your Own Startup?

Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

Our strengths are our weaknesses. Recognizing both sides is the beginning of context-first leadership.

The situation: You’re in a meeting with your leadership team and listening to a report on slow sales growth. As one after the other of your team delivers the figures, you can feel your heart beating faster and your face getting hotter as your mind drifts ahead to your next board meeting, imagining the faces of your board looking back at you with those blank expressions you’ve seen before. You look up from your notes and your team’s eyes are upon you. They look . . . concerned.

You’ve seen those faces before as well.

In the situation above, the meeting, the team around the table, the report, and the upcoming board meeting form the content of your experience. Content is the external stuff of life happening around you. This is very different from what is going on inside you–your state of mind–which forms the context of your experience.

Most startup founders and leaders are unaware they operate on both levels. In fact, as human beings, we spend about 95 percent of the time in drama of the sort depicted in the above scenario. The challenge, then, is not to eliminate the drama patterns we experience, but to learn how to shift our mindset to get different and more desirable results in life.

A powerful way to spot and shift our experience is through persona play.

Personas are our way of processing and managing the challenges and threats we perceive around us. The human psyche contains many personas. Each can serve an important adaptive need, or it can undermine a founder’s success by allowing fear to govern your decisions.

To give you an example of what we’re talking about, here are four common founder personas we’ve seen in action.

Going back to our made-up meeting scenario, do you see one or more of these personas living in you?

1. The Under-resourced Founder: As you hear your team report poor earnings in the example above, does your mind race to a dwindling bank account? Long sales cycles and limited time before the next raise? If so, you’re laboring under a scarcity mindset… There is always too little money, time or people. What’s even more destructive, you believe your people aren’t smart enough or hard-working enough to get the job done. With this mindset, your team will feel perpetually under-resourced and under-the-gun to do more with less–in less time because time, too, is an elusive resource.

2. The Controlling Founder: You are not ashamed to admit that you’re the “command-and-control” type. But can you see how it’s also micro-management? Because your sales team receive little to no real empowerment, it never occurred to them to stray from the clear monthly goals and path you set out for them–and which, by the way, you broke down into weekly and daily tasks and deliverables. As you listen to them deliver the disappointing figures, you find yourself wondering, “What part of qualify-your-leads didn’t they get? I spent three hours last quarter spread-sheeting things for them. Why didn’t any of these drones step forward?”

3. The Anti-conflict Founder: You like to be the “hero” who wants to be known as a “go-to” person and who loves approval and thus ignores your “inner no” telling you that you don’t want to do something. Saying “no” may lose approval. The praise you receive feels good, but its rewards are short-lived and constantly require you to up the ante. Your team likes you personally, which you value, but this makes it painful for them to deliver those unfortunate sales figures to you. And if they were totally honest, more than one of those stares would say, “I told you to scale back those third quarter projections!”

4. The Ever-Vigilant Founder: Those tense stares you’re getting from the team as they watch you seethe over the sales reports is part of the fight, flight, or freeze reaction they’ve learned from walking on eggshells around you. In this instance, they are in freeze mode. They have seen you in panic-mode before and don’t want any more a part of it now than in the past. Around the Ever-Vigilant Founder, people are scared to raise issues that might trigger an over reaction spiral.

Do any of the above ring any bells (or set off any alarms)? When a leader is being unconsciously controlled by one of their personas, he or she may introduce a swarm of possible problems and dysfunctions into the team. The company is constantly in a reactive state. The lack of empowerment among the team may eat away at morale, slow things down or gin up the rumor mill.

Needless to say, none of this is made better when adversity and tough times come knocking. Pressure eats away at collaboration, while trust–the core glue in any company culture–spirals downward. This leads to poor decision making and, the ultimate sign your ship is foundering, increasing turnover.

Now, some good news!

Each of these personas is in possession of a wonderful gift — a super power — that lives inside them and makes them not only unique but advantageous to the leader. For example, the Under-Resourced Founder is resourceful and scrappy and will often find cheaper and creative ways to make do with less–and to a degree that astounds and impresses the team. Who wants to throw good money after bad, after all?

While the Controlling Founder discourages empowerment, he typically offers clear and confident direction, an incredible gift since lack of clarity can stop almost any project or idea dead in its tracks.

The Anti-Conflict Founder has a gift for bringing people along with her and building alignment. She is a positive person and a problem solver who models teamwork and a supportive attitude for her team.

The Ever-Vigilant Founder may see danger and disruption behind every cubicle and frustrate her team, but her constant vigilance also spots a dead-end process or unreliable vendor a mile away. She excels at risk-management and discernment.

All of these super powers form the basis for effective, positive leadership.

And now, the really good news!

As a founder, you co-create your startup’s problems. For example, if you are committed to feeling that you are under-resourced, you will create the conditions that fulfill your belief. It sounds perverse, but that’s the way our brains are wired; they create shortcuts for us so we don’t have to think about every single thing we do. As we come to believe that the world operates in a certain way, our brains protect those beliefs and the emotions we associate with them. If you look for scarcity, you probably won’t recognize a resource in front of you.

If you are in the grasp of a controlling persona who sees a team member’s initiative as a threat, don’t be surprised if your team seems to act timidly, lacking all evidence of initiative and creativity, for that is all you will see in them.

However . . . just as you co-create your limitations and hang-ups, you can also co-create your way out of these problems, access your superpowers and supercharge your team. And you can do so pretty much at will. This is the promise of context-first leadership.

One of the ways we’ve found to harness this power is by involving others in the process. Designate a “buddy” or even your whole team in the process of recognizing your unproductive behavior when it appears and making it safe for others to call you on it.

Better still, make a game out of it. Once you recognize your persona, give it a name and introduce it to your team. Turn the threat into play by exaggerating the “evil” versus “good” sides of the persona. In our fictional team meeting, if you feel your Controlling Founder persona take hold, you might announce that — and playfully say boldly “Well, who created this plan you followed to the letter?” — outing your role and taking ownership for how you and the team arrived at this point.

Another benefit of exaggerating with persona play is that you can see the gifts more clearly as well. For example, if you feel your Ever-Vigilant persona taking hold, imagining the board as a pack of hyenas that will rip you to shreds upon hearing the bad news, use some of the meeting time to list out the “10 things that can go absolutely sideways!” There’s freedom in getting those thoughts out of your head and onto paper where you can see them more clearly.

If you find yourself resonating with our conversation about personas, share this blog with your team and ask them to be honest with you about whether any of these personas seem like you. You might even help them overcome their reluctance by furnishing a clear example of your persona at work in a recent decision or bit of company “drama.” If this sounds too bold to begin with, just send us a short note telling us about your persona.

Awareness is the first step in becoming a strong context-first leader.

Sincerely,

Robert Craven, scalepassion & Dolores Stevens, Founder, Scend

ABOUT DOLORES STEVENS

Dolores Stevens is an executive coach and founder of Scend, a coaching company dedicated to supporting startup founders to lead more consciously. As a startup veteran, Dolores brings a wealth of executive and operational experience to her coaching work. Her coaching methodology helps clients increase clarity and awareness, so that they can operate from their ‘zone of genius’ and reach higher levels of performance with increasingly less effort.

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