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Leading a Startup

May 15, 2008

Frustration! Anger! Stress!

It’s just another day in the life of a startup entrepreneur. One hour you’re dealing with an irate client. The next hour, you’ll be taking it out against your staff.

How do you cope with stress? What “psychological skills” do you need to deal with the every day pressure of managing a startup?

Leading a startup requires more than just having technical skills to survive. Being a good web designer, for example, does not mean you can be good at leading a startup web design firm. Often, having good technical skills works against you — you tend to be meticulous, an irritating “micromanager” unwilling to delegate tasks. This leads to more stress and an unhealthy work environment for your startup.

What you need is a strong emotional makeup. For me, what helped was reading about emotional intelligence (EI) and understanding how it affects us, as individuals and team players. EI taught me a couple of vital lessons to help me lead teams and manage stress. Let me give a very brief summary of what it takes to be emotionally intelligent.

  • Be self-aware. Knowing who you are and what you want to accomplish is important. What do you enjoy doing most? Is your startup a way for you to give you that sense of fulfillment? What do you dislike doing most? 
  • Manage your emotions. Once you are self-aware, you have a better grasp of what fulfills or irritates you. What triggers your happiness? Your anger? What body signals indicate that you are about to explode? Do you notice your blood pulsing in your head, or your heartbeat racing? Will breathing deeply and counting to ten help? Managing emotions does not mean suppressing them. You may still let employees know that you are displeased with their performance, but you don’t have to throw them out of the window because you’re mad as hell (yes, I know one person who did just that!).
  • Have empathy. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes. If someone is underperforming, it’s not just on a whim. There is probably a reason behind it. You need to feel for that person and see it from their perspective. Perhaps a family matter is troubling them. Maybe they’re overworked. The Dalai Lama has a good technique for cultivating empathy. He says to treat everyone as if they were your mother.
That’s it for now. This entry is just part of a series on emotional intelligence and how we can use it to become better startup entrepreneurs. I’ll be building up on this in upcoming blog entries. Do send your questions and comments. 

Written by Ruben Canlas · Filed Under Startups 

Comments

One Response to “Leading a Startup”

  1. Alexander Muse on May 16th, 2008 11:05 am

    Great stuff! Glad to see you are blogging!

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