The quality of an organisation’s leaders is one of the most significant determinants of business success. And yet, CEOs tend to neglect investing in them. As someone in senior leadership myself (albeit in a non-profit), I wanted to ask, why?
In start-ups more than anywhere else, there will always be fires to put out. Commercial targets being missed. Team members underperforming. Investors who want to meet. With urgent priorities continually bearing down on us, there is a huge risk we’ll run from problem to problem, ignoring our most important work.
Training and coaching your leaders is one of these priorities. It rarely feels like a priority (unless one of our leaders is really failing), because we forget that our leaders and how they manage their teams shapes everything else in our organisations.
We tend to ignore the multitude of problems that accompany bad leaders. Poor communication results in execution issues and misalignment between teams. Lack of empathy leads to frustration and burnout in team members. Lack of appropriate goal-setting and performance management leads to lots of busywork with limited results. Lack of positive feedback and recognition leaves a team feeling demotivated and frustrated. Micromanagement leads to a lack of ownership and low job satisfaction. Managers who don’t know how to hire well tend to hire the wrong people, which in turn causes a lot of problems! Ultimately, poor managers lead to higher employee turnover. When GoodHire surveyed 3,000 workers, they found 82% of employees would be willing to leave a bad manager.
It’s because of the importance of the manager, that in my capacity helping to lead a non-profit, I try to devote at least a third of my working time to recruiting and managing our staff and volunteer leaders. If I can help them get their jobs right, the organisation flourishes. If they’re failing, it’s my responsibility to step in and resolve the performance issues.
When we don’t properly support or train our leaders, we’re not the first ones to feel it. They are. Often, they’re willing to take the pain for a while. Some of them might even enjoy the challenge of delivering with limited support. But the chickens will eventually come home to roost. Poorly supported leaders are more likely to burn out or resign.
If we fail to support and train our managers, we’ll end up having to spend more time and money replacing them. It’s better to invest in the person you have, than spend more time & money in hiring, and then have the same problem with a new person!
We tend to forget that people want to grow. That’s why most folk join start-ups. It’s not for the work-life balance! Millennials have been shown to particularly value growth and development. This can sometimes come from working closely with a leader you admire, but often there aren’t even sufficient senior leaders in a start-up to do that! You could try bringing in external experts and putting together your own training course, but that’s a lot of work.
Unless you actively find training opportunities for your team, or allow them to find opportunities for themselves (and give them the budget to do so), then they’ll probably become frustrated, and may be more likely to leave as a result.
If we’re honest, the CEO job description is full enough without adding leadership training into the mix. In a start-up, we typically don’t have the time to follow our leaders around giving them insights into how to manage and providing feedback on their leadership. But, this is precisely what they need!
So, we bring in external coaches, but we don’t have the time to vet these coaches. And we’d put them on training, but again, we don’t have the capacity to find it!
Start-up’s need an practical and scalable solution to train and support their leaders. This is why we’ve put together Greenhouse. It’s a no-fuss solution to train your leaders. They’ll spend 2 days on a leadership intensive with us, and then we’ll give them a pre-vetted coach to support their ongoing development as a leader. They’ll have access to a library of leadership resources and become part of an online community of other leaders they can speak to.
At Greenhouse we’ve gathered a team of start-up leaders, practitioners and leadership thinkers and put together the leadership and management programme that we needed when we started out. Click here to find out more.
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