The Captain

There’s a lot rubbish written about leadership. It can be hard to know what’s what.  Far better to look to your experience, role models, both positive and negative.  When leadership is good it’s really good. And when it’s bad it’s godawful.

My own best moments as a leader were when I didn’t have a formal leadership title; when I wasn’t anyone’s boss, but had to lead people through some kind of change.  My worst were when I was given some people I didn’t particularly rate and ended up doing their jobs as well.

One benefit of working for myself is I’m the boss.

Working this way is pretty good for someone learning to be an entrepreneur like me, because I can muck up in private.  I can change course many times until I feel it’s right.  I can also take a break when I choose.

Yesterday, I took the morning off to go sailing.  I bought my son a little Topper off Facebook a couple of months back and am trying to get ahead of him, so I can keep him alive.  I even did the RYA course, humiliating myself because I was so kamikaze.  So yesterday, was about practising on my own – I had the whole lake to myself in glorious sunshine.  I almost capsized many times, but just managed to avoid it, adjusting until I got better.

It’s subtle this analogy isn’t it?

Now everything is starting to change as I’m no longer just the captain of me, but also the captain of Yunus, several contractors and a number of “support staff” helping me with accounts, tax etc. 

Familiarize had its first team call this week – Yunus, Tom (UX) and me. And although both of them are experts and can do far more than me, I realised it wasn’t a table of peers. Ideas flow, but someone needs to direct, to say what we’ll do with our limited time and budget.  It also felt looser than at bp, like they were choosing to work with me – and they could equally choose somewhere else.

Leading in this context is obviously pretty different from the formal stuff many of us have done in corporates.  But as always there’s a lot to take from our experience there.  Some stuff does need to be formalised – employment contracts, scope of work, quotes.  I suspect those of us who have worked in corporates have thought more deeply about how we keep our teams motivated, how we build culture, how we reward and how we develop our teams.

It’s also more in line with the idea of Servant-Leadership, where we as leaders exist to serve our talent, to unblock, to make life easier for them, to remove distractions.  I’ve seen this already with Yunus, where I am sorting a bunch of admin (buying licences, getting him registered on things, sorting paperwork) that means he can go faster and apply his talents unencumbered.

Here’s some ideas how we can develop a new style of leadership as we grow both ourselves and our businesses:

1. Elevate ourselves – even if only a few minutes a day – to get out of the to-do lists or Trello and make sure we’re doing the right things as well as doing things right.

2. We can’t rely on golden handcuffs to retain talent, so invest time in our people and partners to understand what drives them and how we can find mutual value.

3. Build our culture, even if we’re small, even if you’re just you.  I learnt this lesson a hard way at Launchpad, so I’m passionate about clarifying what Familiarize is and what it’s not, so I only work with the right people, partners and customers.

4. While we don’t want hierarchy, we do need to create some distance as the owners of our companies.  Be conscious of our boundaries and what we share.  Throwaway comments about cash flow can send our hard-won talent into a spin, checking out LinkedIn.

5. Be yourself.  This is the big one.  We have a chance to let our natural leadership shine through in a way that was tough within a corporate, governed by rules, policies and all manner of things we didn’t always agree with (e.g 16 new behaviours to roll out).  It’s like we’ve got the theory, now we can apply it our own way.

I like the metaphor of the Captain, the guide, the person with whom the buck stops, who creates the conditions and culture for other people who know more than him or her to thrive as individuals and as a team to push the ship forward.

So I still have plenty of room to grow.  But I think it’s a good aspiration.

Linked to this, I’ve been thinking of the work the Captain needs to do: set strategy for Familiarize.  It’s something I’ve neither had the space or inclination to do, but now as I need to start thinking about investment I realise this is my next task.  More on developing strategy as a corporate escapologist next time.