People Management for Startup Leaders

One of the greatest challenges of founding and growing a startup company is learning to manage a team of people to accomplish amazing things on a shoestring as fast as possible.

Recently, a technologist friend and I were musing about how to advise one of his startup-founding friends who is feeling a bit overwhelmed as he tries to navigate all of the people challenges of growing his new venture. My friend thought perhaps hiring an HR person – they are human resources, right? – might help. I said that while HR people can provide wonderful support to a fast-growing startup by managing recruiting processes, human resources and benefits administration, culture initiatives, and various other compliance and legal employment tasks, HR people are not actually the team members who are going to manage the people who make up a startup.

Startups may include R&D, sales, marketing, finance, customer support, IT, regulatory, and many other functions. However, if you step back and squint, you will realize that what makes up those functions are people developing and executing business processes. While startups may include great inventions and technology innovations, those inventions and innovations were generated by people’s creativity. High-potential startups often have to raise money from investors, who are people as well. Managing people is one of the absolute most critical skills a startup leader must master because, at its core, the building blocks of a startup organization (or really any organization!) are people.

What is the function of management?

At its core, management is the process of getting the work done to efficiently and effectively achieve an organization’s goals. That means defining the mission and goals of a company, setting the organization’s strategy, and coordinating the efforts of the team to accomplish these objectives with whatever resources you collect and deploy. Words like leading, planning, organizing, directing, staffing, controlling, deciding, and actuating are all associated with the actions of a manager. Of course, I do not mean to imply that the fantastic and brilliant team of stakeholders you recruit to your cause will not have much to contribute to each and every bit of what you are doing. It does mean that someone or some team needs to take an ownership mentality and drive the bus full of people you have in all the right seats contributing their time and talents to your venture.

Who manages the people in a startup?

This may seem like an obvious question, but I have had so many conversations with people who seem unsure about who organizes the work and manages the people in a startup that I think I should spell it out. When it comes right down to it, since startups are constructed out of people, it is the startup’s management team that manages those people.That means that if you are considering founding and leading a startup, you need to be prepared to become a people manager. As your startup develops, you will find that more and more of your time is ultimately spent on people management work. Some days it will feel like all that you do!

How do you learn to be a manager? (I would love to hear others’ reflections on this!)

Many have looked at me a bit daunted when we start exploring what it means to manage a startup (aka manage a startup’s people), so as I worked on an answer for my friend, I started reflecting about how in the world I learned to build and manage startup teams? It feels like quite a puzzle. Almost 35 years into my career, management is now as natural to me as breathing. How did I learn these skills?

Perhaps it all started when I was a child, and my parents noticed that I was always leading, organizing, and taking over groups of kids around me? So, maybe there is some inherent aptitude that I was born with?

As an undergraduate, I was fascinated by people and what they do, so I studied organizational psychology and leadership. That certainly added concepts to my brain, but I did not take a class that taught me how to manage work.

While as a graduate MBA student with concentrations in management and finance, I learned many tools and techniques for analyzing and building companies, but I do not think I learned much about the master skill of leading and managing people, except as it applied to muddling my way through group projects.

Later, as an operations improvement consultant, I managed thirty-five progressively more complex client-consultant teams for twenty-five different companies. This is probably where my skills really started to expand, under the coaching and mentorship of more experienced project leaders.

Then I made the leap and started founding and growing high-potential startups, often starting with just one or two people and growing teams up to nearly 100 employees. I found that I was weaving together ideas about leadership I learned early on with project management skills and tools introduced in graduate school and honed under the hot fire of must-deliver-for-the-client consulting projects.

Now, for the past twenty-plus years, I have been applying my leadership, management, selling, and fundraising skills to founding and leading high-potential startups in various sectors. The core building blocks of managing people in different domains have many similarities, and each new day provides new experiences to add to my skills repertoire.

Tips on Developing Your Startup People Manager Skillset

We each travel a unique path in developing, broadening, and deepening our skills and experiences. Based on my journey, if you are seeking to layer in people management skills, I suggest seeking out the following:

• Study leadership and people – Read books, blogs, and articles about leadership, business management, and people management. This starts to give you a framework for thinking about business leadership. It also helps you think about how people are different and how you might need to adapt your approach to different people to be effective.
  
  
• Manage projects – Often, there are opportunities in college or larger organizations to lead projects. Start small and short-term. Keep at it, progressively adding complexity and scale.
  
  
• Seek opportunities to manage progressively bigger and more complex teams – Start small and grow your way into tackling more complex management challenges. Work within your function, then across functions, and add people outside your organization. As you become more comfortable at each level, seek to push beyond your comfort zone and tackle more significant challenges.
  
  
• Learn about business functions – Weaving together a team with complementary skills to accomplish the diverse functions a business requires demands learning the basics of different functions and what strengths and skills are needed in each. Learn. Learn. Learn.
  
  
• Seek out mentors – I have not run across much in the way of comprehensive management training. It might exist in some large corporate training centers. However, I think most of us learn at the elbow of a talented boss who gets us started. Then we need to constantly seek out those who do it well and see if we can figure out and adapt for ourselves what makes them effective. Often, if asked, skilled people managers will happily discuss their lessons learned.
  
  
• Collaborate with colleagues – Becoming aware and intentional often depends on feedback. Ask the people around you to help by giving feedback on what you are doing well and what could use some work. Actively seeking feedback is a way to create your own virtuous learning cycle.
  
  
• (Shameless plug) Read this blog – So much of what I think and write about in www.StartupCEOReflections.com is connected to the challenge of leading groups of people on the journey to build a startup together. There are hints, tips, and tricks woven all through my posts. This is one of the themes that permeate my attempt to give something valuable to startup leaders to help them on their journeys.
  

No doubt there are other ways to build up your skills in the art of people management, and you should probably try anything that comes across your radar because getting good at this is pivotal for startup leaders. And I do not think anyone ever achieves complete mastery, so there is always something more to learn because people are so wondrously complex and nuanced!