Every startup needs a leadership coach. Here’s why.
Growing a start-up requires the help of a number of experts with skills you as a founder likely don’t have. For example, from the outset I knew that I would need a great lawyer, a financial consultant who gets hardware businesses, and some key industry advisors who could help me navigate the fundraising world. While all of these experts have proven critical to Flexia’s growth, the one I’m most thankful for on a daily basis is our executive leadership coach, or ELC for short.
Almost two years into my journey at Flexia, through a seed raise, getting product in customer’s hands, and growing the team to 7 full-time employees and even more contractors, I look around and wonder how other startups get anywhere without one.
Here’s how ours is helping us and why you may want to consider working with one as well to help you build a team that is greater than the sum of all its parts.
Management skills
I realize I’m stating the obvious, but start-ups are hard, even when things are going well! Beyond that, they are often founded by people who have deep domain knowledge of the subject matter in their field. This is important for creating a superior and innovative product, however, this is only one aspect of what ensures that a start-up will be successful. You must also be able to scale what you are building effectively and quickly by working with other people. This can only be achieved by expanding and leading a team. For that you need management skills.
Many founders have never been in a position to develop the skills required to effectively communicate with a team of people and navigate interpersonal conflict. Initially, this may not seem important, but it can create holes in the foundation of your company and foster resentment amongst your team. When you and your team are unable to communicate effectively and work well together, it’s unnecessarily difficult to produce something innovative and slows down production. This also stifles creativity because your energy is devoted to reacting to miscommunication instead of coming up with new ideas and solutions to move the company forward.
An ELC can teach you how to become an effective manager, resolve interpersonal challenges among team members with less escalation, and work with your team to create a framework to address communication tactics before they become a challenge.
What it looks like to work with an ELC.
ELC’s can do individual or group coaching, similar to that of a therapist, except the skills that you’re building are specific to business.
On an individual level, they can teach you how to effectively manage people and grow into your role as a leader. This often involves creating a vision statement, such as describing where you see yourself in a year operating as the leader who you aspire to be. From there, you can identify the specific behaviors that would demonstrate that you are achieving your vision statement. As you continue to work together, you can reflect on missteps as they occur and identify how you can correct them in the future to align with your vision.
When meeting as a group, ELC’s can get your team on the same communication framework for creating, operating, and communicating. This may look like addressing organization and management topics together to facilitate clear communication strategies. This can be helpful because it allows you to decide as a group how you want to communicate with each other and identify how well your communication methods are working.
They can also mediate conflict between team members that tend to arise when two people are really talented within their roles, but have different communication strategies. While these team members want to come to an agreement, their different communication strategies may cause them to butt heads which can make working together frustrating and contribute to hurt feelings and ineffective work. During a mediation, the leadership coach can guide the conversation surrounding the issue at hand and create strategies for working together in the future to avoid repeating or escalating the current conflict.
How to find an ELC
In my experience, many of the most effective ELC’s aren’t advertising what they do and are unlikely to show up in a google search. Rather, this is a good time to ask your professional network if they have any referrals. This may include asking fellow founders, investors, advisors, and past colleagues. You may also want to consult local start-up networking organizations. While this may feel like a lot of legwork, finding the right fit for your company will be instrumental to the long term growth of your company and happiness of your team, so it is worth taking the time to ask around.
Have you worked with an ELC? If so, what insight have you gained from your experience? Let me know in the comments section.
