Take a founder pit-stop to revert gears

As a founder, you believe it’s YOUR job to lead from the front. You work the longest hours, are always on stand-by, and constantly driving revenue and growth. STOP! This is both a damaging and dangerous misconception. Founders of the most successful companies lead and inspire. But to do so successfully, you must take the time to reflect and learn, to check-in at each growth-stage, and allocate dedicated time to your quarterly role.

Building a high-growth company

There’s no recipe for building a high-growth company but disciplining yourself to periodically check-in — both on the progress of your company and personal capacity will ensure you and your team are prepared for the next phase of your startup.

Suranga Chandratillake, former CEO of Blinkx and partner at Balderton Capital, says that the role of the CEO changes “at different points of a company’s evolution.” He continues that founders should “on a regular basis,” revisit where their company is. The key to understanding the “staged nature of the job” is to find “time to analyse yourself,” as well as taking time to review high-level reporting and future plans including “how you are going to help.” Chandratillake says that his biannual “personal offsite” allows him to catch moments of “over/under-scaling fairly quickly and revert as necessary.” His advice is for all CEOs to follow this same mechanism.

A study by Egon Zehnder in 2018, of 402 global CEOs, found 79% agree that they need the capacity to transform themselves as well as their respective organizations, despite being confident in their own skills. 54% believe that personal reflection is essential to the role of the CEO. The Harvard Business Review writes that leaders need to “re-cultivate the art of reflection,” and points at Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet — who all take time for projects related to personal development. Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn CEO, considers this scheduled time as his “single most important productivity tool.”

Building capacity to transition

You may not be able to spare two hours of your day. However; a stop, think, and ‘check-in’ approach is essential and will help spot leading indicators of potential trouble. Don’t wait until your company misses a revenue target or fails to launch a product on time to admit you have large organisational challenges to unpack. This late detection can pose a far too great a cost. Early indicators include feeling overworked, concentrating too much on a single area of a business, maladjusted focus, postponing important changes or upgrades in lieu of “the right time.” You may even be directly advised that you should delegate more.

‘Keep telling yourself you’re too busy working to figure out why you’re so “busy,” who you need to be as a leader, and what you’d like your company to be.

Perhaps, when you wake in the middle of the night to respond to that “urgent” Slack notification, you can figure out where the company is headed.”

The Secret to Stopping

You may find yourself caught up in daily tasks, believing incorrectly that you should not be away from work. That it is selfish to take time out, that you are “too busy.”

• Press “PAUSE” on the soundtrack that is the daily rush.
• Take a step back.
• Create time to check-in — especially at times of transition (new funding, management layers or additions to your senior team).
• Take stock — an overview of BOTH your operation’s and your own performance, performance and progress towards goals, financials and forecast data, employee performance, along with the softer yet crucial elements such as your mission and values.
• Create a next stage ready mindset — understand what skills will be required in the future and give yourself time to prepare for them.

This will be key in ensuring that both you and your company continue to scale. It will allow you as the founder to recoup and refocus. In addition, you will be able to pass this same motivation and growth mindset to your entire team.

Create a healthy pause mechanism in your journey as a founder, so you can revert gears where necessary and accelerate quicker.

Multiplii helps help early stage teams in Europe to become scale ready through founder off-sites.Visit multiplii.io for more information.