Mayhem to Mastery: How to Thrive Working With (or For) the Company's Founder

Mayhem to Mastery: How to Thrive Working With (or For) the Company's Founder

Founders are dynamic and fascinating individuals. Often nonconformists, they struggle to fit into prescriptive corporate structures and cultures. Virtually all are passionate visionaries, committed to changing their corner of the world. And their drive—wow! “Excessive to the point of obsession” is how many of them wake up most mornings. Such energy is both a gift and a curse.

 

Whether you’re an executive working for a founder or a private equity operating partner aiming to harness a founder’s best traits (while minimizing the worst), following these five rules can increase your chances of success and help you avoid passionate, dramatic clashes.

 

1.     Don’t Underestimate Their Knowledge and Experience. A founder’s list of basic business management deficiencies might be a mile long, but what they do know could be the keys to the company’s continued growth. The fact they’ve been running a business successfully with just a pencil and legal pad (as I saw with my own eyes recently) is your signal that their other skills and abilities must be even more amazing. Focus on those talents and strive to extract every possible piece of knowledge from them.

 

2.     Reinforce Their Vision and Values. Founders are less likely to fight you over particular tactics and strategies if you can show how those new ideas support their original vision and values. Watch closely how they action their values to understand them more clearly. Even the most stubborn founders will pivot if someone calls them out for not following their own values.

 

3.     Match Their Energy—but Beware. Early in my career, I survived 13 years with an at-times crazy founder by keeping pace with his curiosity and intensity. The trouble is that founders commonly overvalue people with the same level of intensity, even if the go-getter isn’t suitable for the job. That is more of a historical reaction responding to urgent hiring needs with a limited talent pool. When hiring talent, you will gain their respect if “Speed" or “Intensity” is near the top of the scorecard. 

 

4.     Own the Outcomes. Founders see their business holistically. They don’t care which part of the org chart you’ve been assigned to achieve the outcome. If you’re on the team, take responsibility regardless and you will be promoted swiftly.

 

5.     Embrace or Overlook their Quirks. Founders often create businesses, so they have a place to work that accepts their quirks. So long as those quirks aren’t detrimental to the business’s continued success, look past them. You’ll find that very few of them are corporate poison.


Founders have taken on amazing risks and generally respect a set of cultural and financial tenets required for success. Otherwise, they would have failed years ago. Celebrate them! Gain their trust, collaborate, and make their vision even grander.

 

Hire Smarter™

Tony Misura

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