How to Tame the Elephant in the Startup

Photo by MARIOLA GROBELSKA on Unsplash

When the going gets edgy, these tools help you create a culture of courage and openness in your change-the-world company.

Let me throw a couple scenarios your way to see if they ring any bells.

Scenario #1: You are the founder of an exciting change-the-world brand and are laying out an idea you’ve been ruminating on for your team. And you are on a roll. There is no question or objection they could throw at you that you couldn’t field because you’ve thought this through. As you look around the group, heads seem to be nodding in the right direction, so by the end of the meeting you’re feeling pretty certain your team is on board.

And then the next meeting comes around, and nobody has done anything with your idea. You’d heard that questions still lingered after the meeting, but since nobody came up to you and expressed their reservation or fear or objection, you assumed that wheels were in motion. Bad assumption. You feel let down, disappointed, and soon frustration creeps in. And now you can feel your blood pressure rising as everyone files into the meeting room. . . .

Scenario #2: This one is a bit simpler: somebody on your team is leading a project that isn’t going particularly well, but nobody on the team is saying anything about it, at least not in a constructive and transparent way. As a result, tensions continue to fester among your team and high drama is replacing high performance and entrenchment is replacing collaboration.

Both of these scenarios depict an elephant in the room that conscious leadership dubs below-the-line thinking. It is ultimately based on fear, and it falls to leaders to spot these destructive behaviors before they turn into a full-blown crisis within the team. As I have noted in this space before, we at Findaway Adventures encourage our investment companies to consider using conscious leadership tools for avoiding or, when problems have already arisen, resolving conflicts such as these.

Two such tools come immediately to mind. The first is to do a deep dive with the team using a tool called Fact Vs. Story that helps you differentiate facts from the stories people tell instead. (I’ll offer examples in a moment.) This can break the cycle of entrenchment or silence and help people hold their stake in the problem more loosely.

If someone on the team has a problem with one person or the entire team and needs to be more “revealed” — i.e., transparent about their fears, beliefs or other concerns — in order to push through and get to the other side, while also building trust with the team, then an issue clear might be in order. You can issue clear with a person or with an entire team, but with the team one person has to represent the team to allow the process to work.

I have used these techniques myself as the CEO at my former company. One of the more dramatic examples was when my vision team met with our research and development team to discuss how we could meet our consumers’ demand for new products (and more quickly put to use all the great data we had on them) by reducing new productive development from six months to 100 days. Before I practiced conscious leadership, R&D’s answer, “It can’t be done,” might have triggered me to counter angrily with my own story, “Yes, it can,” or “Why not?”

However, using the Fact Vs. Story tool, I was able to have a measured and genuine give and take with the R&D leader that was based on facts. For example, we pulled out the old Gantt charts and went through them line by line. If he had earmarked four weeks for one process to take place, I would ask him why it took four weeks. I made sure he knew that I was coming from a place of genuine curiosity and not reproachfulness or frustration.

In other words, I was ready to accept his explanation as sufficient if I could see no way to change the process. This established a mutual trust between us and ultimately led to our success in dramatically reducing our NPD timeframe.

Your team will know when you are coming from a place of genuine, above-the-line curiosity because it will be exploratory and guided by generosity, a willingness to understand a different perspective and make sense of new facts. Genuine curiosity differs from what I call “Law and Order” curiosity, which is reductive and argumentative. The goal of “Law and Order” curiosity is to feed somebody questions that allow him to knit a noose to hang himself with.

This may be good for TV drama but it stinks for real-life teamwork.

Once the air is clear and all the facts, feelings, and stories have been shared, you might look for a way to hold the situation even lighter … maybe celebrate every complaint as a learning opportunity or put all the negative emails or paperwork complaints following a big project in a big bin and burn them while you toast and drink to amor fati and better days ahead?

Life is short. We have to enjoy the journey!

Let me know how you are building a culture of greater courage and transparency at your change-the-world company.

Sincerely,

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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!