Tag: leadership

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Prioritize needs over wants

As the HeartThis CEO, I constantly struggle with the conflict between what I need to do vs what I want to do. I spent most of my career as a software engineer and/or product manager, so I have a natural affinity for rolling up my sleeves and getting dirty building product. As CEO, that’s in direct conflict with my core priorities of setting the company vision, securing funding, and hiring and retaining a great team. As much as I want to slap on headphones and crank out a new feature, it’s my duty to set the team up for a long-term win. Focusing on hiring a new crack engineer who can do dev work full-time is a much higher leverage use of my time. Coding is a want, but recruiting is a need.

Similarly, while fundraising, it was painful to note the decreased speed of product development. I kept asking myself “what could we have accomplished if we spent these two months head-down building product rather than sitting in meetings talking to investors?” In reality, that was the ultimate short-term thinking. It’s true that fundraising slowed recruiting and product development down substantially, but it ultimately gave us the cash necessary to go out and hire top-notch talent.

A good leader has to learn to trust their team and stay focused on doing what needs to be done for the good of the company, even when it doesn’t perfectly align with what they want to do. I suspect this is one of the harder leadership lessons to learn for people who come from “hands-on” positions like engineering and design. I do still tend to do a small amount of dev work each week, but now it’s typically my lowest priority task that only gets addressed after everything else has been taken care of.

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Focus on strengths, protect against weaknesses

Perhaps the most important skill that every entrepreneur needs to learn is focus. A lack of of product focus leads to feature creep, a lack of design focus leads to weak user experiences, and a lack of personal focus leads to poor execution. Taking careful stock of your personal strengths and weaknesses and then zeroing in on how to leverage your strengths and mitigate your weaknesses will help determine your role in tackling the endless stream of challenges that you face when building a startup.

Focus on your strengths because that’s where you have the potential to be great, and winning at scale as a startup requires greatness. To identify your strengths consider what things are either inherently good at (ex. if you’re a naturally engaging public speaker) or things that you have built up expertise in through experience (ex. if you spent 10 years working in advertising and know the business inside and out). Next, aggressively develop these strengths, ideally to the point where you are materially better than your peers at them. Finally, ensure that a large part of your role in the company is centered around these unique strengths. This laser focus on identifying, growing, and leveraging your strengths will insure you’re making the greatest impact possible at your company.

In addition to strengths, we all have weaknesses. In the time and cash-constrained environment of a startup, time and effort spent trying to improve personal weaknesses should be minimized. Self-improvement is a long and difficult process, and chances are that even with significant effort you will not be able to turn your weakness into great enough strengths to be considered a competitive advantage. Instead, try to protect against your weaknesses. The easiest way to do this is by allying yourself with people whose strengths complement your own. It sounds simple, but you would be shocked at how many people, particularly in leadership positions, try to handle everything themselves. I’ve been guilty of it myself in the past, and I can tell you from personal experience that it does not end well! It should be noted that identifying your own weaknesses is fairly difficult, so I highly recommend enlisting the help of trusted peers to generate an honest assessment.

Mark Zuckerberg is a great example of someone who successfully focuses on strengths and protects against his weaknesses. I don’t know him personally, but my understanding through mutual connections is that Mark truly excels at product and engineering. However, prior to Facebook ,he had no real large-scale operations/management experience and doesn’t have a natural inclination for either. Rather than spend time trying to master all skills necessary to run a multi-billion dollar behemoth, he mitigated his shortcomings by establishing an excellent team of advisors with experience growing successful companies. Most importantly, he hired Sheryl Sandberg as Facebook’s COO. This was a brilliant move. Sandberg knows business and ops inside and out, and by letting her guide those functions at Facebook Mark is able to fully leverage his product and technology strengths. One tell-tale sign of a great leader is if they are strategic about surrounding themselves with complementary talent.