Leadership in a world of equals

I put this image for no reason except that it looks nice

Recently I remember speaking to a group of future leaders from some of India’s foremost companies and someone asked a question, “What defines a great leader”. I think I gave a wholly unsatisfactory answer at that time centered around enabling people. And its just a role that others decided to foist on a person. I saw a lot of confusion in people’s eyes.

I can see how in certain contexts (like a traditional family owned business), folks can confuse leadership with dictatorship, with a sense of kingdom or glory. But in a pure tech setup, the company is a group of equals all of who have come together to further a common goal. How does a leader operate in that context?

I have been reflecting on that question in the past few weeks especially through the break and heading back into work. I have consistently said that the new wave of Indian startups need to focus a lot more on core technology and product, and less on the land grab. This land-grab worked in an era when the competition was lack of infrastructure/policy. But today the competition is some of the best product companies in the world. And for this we need a lot of tech leaders to emerge in the country. So how should these people lead? What are some things that work well for leaders in technology startups?

For better or worse, here are few rules from my playbook. I have seen it work, I have seen it fall flat on its face. But its usually a good starting point for most people centric, tech heavy companies.

• Spend a ton of time fixing the seams of the organization so that folks can communicate with each other a lot better. Focus specifically on three things: information exchange, dependency breaking, and decision making. There are various setups that can supercharge these and I will write about that at some point
• Roughly 33% of a leader’s job is to hire. Make yourself redundant. So groom internally, and hire the best externally. Make it such that if you get run over by a bus, the team has a strong set of leaders who will take it from there seamlessly. This is the big one
• Identify key leaders in the team and pay a lot of attention to them. The more you invest into the next set of leaders, the more you will be freed up to do higher order tasks that can make everyone’s lives better
• Do those freaking higher order tasks. A key aspect of a leader is to know what stuff is their business and what stuff is the business of their teams. Enable the later through empowerment and by developing talent. Focus on the former. That is your day job. Identify problems that no one else can solve and go figure them out. A leader is primarily a problem solver
• Empower, empower, empower. Innovation happens when everyone on the floor has an avenue to be heard, to articulate their ideas and have a chance to see them executed. Providing a framework for folks to be able to come to you with their ideas and a setup where they can go prototype without approvals. This is a critical aspect of leadership in the tech context
• The biggest asset of a tech firm is its people. So spend a lot of time with them, find avenues to work together, walk on the floor a lot, setup office hours, find meeting setups that are driven by the team and not by you. Kill reviews, kick off brainstorming. Stop pointing out issues, collaborate to solve them
• Buffer your team from shit. There is always the inevitable politics, confusion, overlapping mandates. A good leader learns how to manage them in such a way that it does not affect the workings of her team. This is super hard to do. Your primary responsibility to ensure the sanity of your team. That is why they choose you to be their leader
• Finally, and this one is the hardest. A true leader always stands up for the right thing. Surprisingly, the right decision or call is usually pretty obvious. But its a human tendency to complicate things and make such decisions tough. Make the right call for the company, do not bother about what others will say or do.

Because leadership is not a popularity contest.

If you want to be well liked and make hard decisions, then might as well call it quits. That combination has never happened in the short term. Nor should be your goal. In the long term, folks who do the right thing are the only ones remembered for their leadership.