Unintentional Blocking

A business leader with dominating authority can unintentionally freeze their team with careless communications, resulting in a loss of empowerment and forward progress. This dynamic emphasizes how important it is for business leaders, especially entrepreneurs building up a team, to develop effective leadership and management skills.

When I was just out of college, I worked directly on the staff of a major money center bank Executive Vice President. In his top leadership role, he vibrated with both authority and strategic influence. He led a vast swath of the bank’s thousands of employees and was widely acknowledged as one of the power brokers within the organization. He taught me how careful leaders must be not to stifle creativity, innovation, and forward progress because it is so easy for a question or a comment from someone like him to freeze or redirect his team members. Those around him were always trying to figure out how to do what he was asking or make him happy in whatever way. Thus, if he inadvertently did not affirm those directions, they tended to stop and wait to ensure they were not making a mistake like a deer in headlights. This pattern of people routinely looking to him for approval and confirmation of their direction required him to be continually aware of how his comments, feedback, and actions were being perceived. I often saw it happen because, as a member of his direct staff, I frequently spoke on his behalf, learning to identify the signs of someone who had frozen and would get them unstuck and moving confidently again.

Sometimes, I see this same pattern in startups with strong CEOs as they are building their teams. New team members are often uncertain about what they can do independently or when they need the CEO’s permission. This behavior pattern is especially acute during onboarding when the CEO is often quite cautious about delegating authority while a new team member is still coming up to speed. The challenge is that habit of waiting for permission and approval can persist long after the team member is fully up the learning curve and ready to move things forward more independently. The CEO must deliberately and intentionally take some small risks to encourage the new team member to start working independently or their full potential to help the organization will not be realized.

This is a critical growth point for a first-time CEO who, at the earliest stages, necessarily has their hands in everything. However, a high-potential startup quickly outgrows that behavior pattern. The company’s growth will be constrained if the CEO cannot figure out how to let go and empower team members. Here are some examples of the kinds of behaviors that a startup CEO or other business leader needs to intentionally move past so the organization can grow and mature:

• Believing that no one else is as capable as they are. Those with an entrepreneurial spirit often swim upstream as they invent new solutions to critical unmet needs, which demands extraordinary insight and confidence. However, this confidence can become overconfidence. It is imperative to hire top-notch team members that they can delegate to and trust rather than feeling the need to be involved in every decision as the company grows.
  
  
• Approving every single expenditure. You must begin to allow others to take over decision-making on certain areas of purchasing and establish mature processes for exercising proper fiscal oversight.
  
  
• Doing all outside negotiations yourself. You must identify low-risk negotiations and let others tackle those.
  
  
• Signing every contract. You must empower some of your team to commit the organization. Define a scope of authority and let your team members make low-risk decisions in that area. Almost everything can be reversed, so give them enough space to make decisions and focus your attention on being clear about the goals, objectives, and parameters upfront.
  
  
• An obsession with constant updates. Asking for constant updates bogs down your team in spending their time updating you rather than focusing on moving the ball forward. It also creates a culture of disempowerment as people feel like they must constantly justify themselves and are not trusted to do their jobs.

These poor leadership behaviors can undermine the team that must come together and build something new. A strong leader will be actively working to move from being the innovating center to building up and empowering a great team. This takes time, process development, training, and intentionality as the startup CEO has to move from doing many things personally to building an organization that can be successful. Emotionally, this transition is challenging but essential.