8 Leadership Traits of Successful Startup Founders

Successful startups are blessed with great leaders. During my last 8 years stint in startup industry wherein I had the privilege of interacting with many founders, I have observed following Leadership traits which differentiated Leaders of Successful Startups from other startups:

1. They play the role of Mentor, Advisor & Coach at the same time.

In corporate world, you will find various leaders who will play the role of either a mentor or an advisor or a coach. In startups, I have noticed that the founders wear the hats of Mentor, Advisor and Coach simultaneously. As a Mentor, they focus on creating a life long career & experience for their team members. In most cases, they remain connected even when their team members move out of the organization. As an Advisor, they provide specific technical guidance to their team members at work. As a Coach, they facilitate the learning of the individual and focus on result achievement. They are experts in generating results from others. They differentiate when it comes to managing their team. They know each member is unique and they somehow figure out how to capitalize on it.

2. They follow Darwin’s Evolutionary model while scaling the organization

They know that org evolution is an iterative algorithm which has to follow a defined process. We all know that the best evolutionary algorithm has been replicated by life on earth. Startup founders somehow try to follow the same model — they start with designing the process/product either fresh or copying the basic elements from successful ones (mapping & copying), tinkering / varying/ or replicating in different domain (mutation & reproduction) , piloting to check for early success (survival) & expanding/deploying (living) using agile model of trial & error.

When it comes to responding to competition or market changes, they have mastered the art of sensing the environment, learn quickly, adapting to changes and integrate in the organization. This helps them to speed up the adaptation cycle of organization to cope up with the turbulent environment (VUCA).

3. They play the role of Creator, Preserver & Destroyer.

They are the ones who come up with ideas to create new products, services or processes; preserve the ideas for good time in spite of challenges, resistance & market not being ready; and finally destroy / kill the processes or products at the right time especially when it is at peak. This helps them to ensure that they are always innovating and remain ahead of the competition.

4. They know how to play with Theory of Constraints

Startups work amidst lots of constraints. They have mastered the art of using constraints as a pivot to push them to be highly creative. They constructively use opposing ideas and instead choosing one at the expense of the other, they come up with a solution in the form of new idea that nit only contains elements of the opposing ideas but also is better than each.

5. They believe in Slowing things down to Speed up

This is a very unique traits among successful founders. They purposely slow down things to understand the intertwined complex dynamics of the system. so that they can speed up quickly. During the slow down phase, they assess the model and look for pivot points. When seen in slow motion, its easy to pull things apart and work on the problem. Once the pivots are identified, they quickly create fulcrum mechanism which propels the system at great speed. This sometimes leads to employees getting confused & frustrated as to why leaders are slowing things when everything is going well.

6. They have a complex personality

I have heard people saying that it is tough to understand the personality of the founders. They do not display clear cut personality traits, its a mix of traits. This is because they are able to express full range of personality traits. It is their unique ability to move from one extreme to the other extreme as the occasion requires.

They are stubborn because they simply refuse to accept the status quo as they believe there is got be a better way.

They always seek different perspectives, even if it is of opposing ideas. Due to this inherent nature, they always tend to emphasize on efficiency, productivity & prioritization. This helps them in operating with strong result orientation.

They are high on resilience — recover positively from failures. They remain composed & confident even in times of uncertainty; while others make fun that they are ignorant, it is not ignorance but their resilience that they know they will come back.

They have an inspirational personality and people follow them because of their leadership traits and not because of authority.

7. They are super quick in Decision making process

They have mastered the skill when it comes to decision making. They are super quick like air force pilots who make quick decisions. They do not believe in wasting too much time in gathering data to make the perfect decision. If the decision is reversible, they simply go ahead and recall the decision if required. If the decision is irreversible, they look at the consequences. They play it safe if consequences have detrimental impact, else they go ahead with it.

8. They are able to manage both personal & professional life

This is something I personally loved about them. Like others, I also had the perception that startup founders would be working 18–20 hrs a day and would be sacrificing their personal life. On working with them closely and interacting with their spouse and kids, I realized that they are better in managing both part of lives compared to others. They believe that both personal and professional work is important and they give due importance to both.

They also take intermittent long breaks from work. They believe that in course of daily life, it can be hard to actually see oneself from the outside. They try removing themselves from the environment and routine to view their inner selves. And in order to do that, they purposely take regular as well as long breaks from work.