Transitioning from an individual technical contributor to a people manager is difficult for any engineer or developer. As a founder, those leadership growth pains impact your entire company.
By acknowledging your deficiencies, studying management best practices, and investing in your development, you can evolve into the leader your startup needs.
Common Leadership Gaps for Engineering Founders
Typical startup founder weaknesses include:
- Delegation – Doing tasks yourself rather than handing off
- Performance management – Discomfort having tough development conversations
- Communication – Struggling to inspire and relate to people
- Coaching / mentoring – Impatience to develop junior members
- Strategic thinking – Getting bogged down in details vs. big picture
- Influencing skills – Challenges rallying support for ideas or changes
Without self-awareness, founder limitations constrain company growth. Be honest about abilities requiring improvement.
Recognise the Required Mindset Shift
As founder, you must transition from:
- Individual contributor to team builder
- Tactical worker to visionary leader
- Technology focused to business/product focused
- Solitary to collaborative
- Deep specialist to generalist overseeing many functions
- Self-driven to inspiring others
- Perfecting execution yourself to developing organizational capabilities
This mental model pivot doesn’t come naturally to many engineers. But embracing it unlocks your leadership potential.
Engage an Executive Coach
An outside expert mentor provides objective guidance on your blind spots as founder:
- A qualified executive coach observes your leadership approach to identify strengths, weaknesses, and development areas.
- Through regular sessions, they impart frameworks, tools, and customized exercises to coach new skills.
- An effective coach challenges you beyond your comfort zone while providing encouragement and accountability.
Starting management coaching early when deficiencies are smaller prevents systemic bad habits from taking root.
Study How Seasoned Founders Lead
Learn from those who’ve scaled startups before:
- Read and listen to interviews with startup founders discussing their leadership journeys. Note which approaches resonate with you.
- Follow founders you admire on social media and subscribe to their content to gain insights on their philosophies.
- Reach out to founders in your network for coffee chats. Ask how they evolved as leaders and overcame struggles like yours.
- Connect with founders of companies a few years ahead of you to learn from their more advanced experiences taking teams from 10 to 50+ employees.
Pattern-match their advice to your situation vs. reinventing the wheel. Stand on the shoulders of those who’ve built startups from scratch before.
Invest in Management Training
Fill experience gaps with structured learning:
- Complete leadership courses on platforms like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, and edX covering management frameworks and soft skills.
- Attend seminars on topics like communication, strategic planning, execution, and shaping culture.
- Consider an executive education program at a nearby business school on entrepreneurial leadership.
- Work through books like High Output Management, Leading Change, and Start with Why that are startup founder canon.
Management wisdom won’t materialize from the ether without intentional self-education. Fortune favours the prepared mind.
Build Critical Leadership Muscles
Develop proficiency in skills every founder need:
Emotional intelligence – Reading team dynamics and personalities to lead effectively. Building rapport.
Strategic thinking – Evaluating decisions in context of big picture vision and priorities vs. tactical minutiae.
Influence – Selling ideas, persuading teams, negotiating wins.
Communication – Conveying complex concepts clearly. Inspiring and aligning people through messaging.
Coaching / mentoring – Supporting individual growth. Counselling through struggles. Developing rising stars.
Resilience – Bouncing back from failures and criticism. Maintaining tenacity despite setbacks.
Culture – Modelling and reinforcing workplace values, norms and behaviours.
These muscles strengthen over time with deliberate practice and application.
Adapt Your Style
Leadership must resonate with cultural context. Adjust your approach:
- Adapt directness, formality, and clarity of communication to what motivates your team.
- Recognize introverts may need space to process before responding. Extroverts appreciate rapid back-and-forth.
- Provide detailed step-by-step plans for tactical thinkers. Share vision and invite input from creative types.
- Some are more motivated by competition and individual recognition. Others value team collaboration.
Observe and learn preferences of people you lead. Optimize your interactions accordingly.
Seek Out Candid Feedback
Ego can obscure your blind spots. Proactively solicit input from your team through:
- Anonymous surveys on your strengths and weaknesses as a manager.
- 1:1 discussions encouraging candid developmental feedback. Have thick skin.
- Skipping level meetings where your reports’ managers relay their teams’ sentiment.
- A trusted peer founder who interviews your employees to uncover opportunities.
- Leadership coaching assessments based on peer interviews highlighting growth areas.
The truth can hurt but it’s critical for self-improvement. Welcome it.
Make Time for Self-Reflection
Reflect continuously on your leadership:
- Identify your natural strengths and styles to double down on.
- What situations recently triggered unease, frustration or avoidance? Analyse why.
- Think back on conflicts. Consider what behaviours you demonstrated that inflamed or resolved them?
- What advice do you frequently give employees that you should heed yourself?
- Which founders exemplify leadership you admire? Which are counterexamples to learn from?
The best development happens when lessons turn inward. Ponder your own experiences.
Practice Managing Performance
Strengthening underdeveloped skills takes repetitious practice:
- Roleplay challenging leadership conversations with mentors for feedback.
- Initiate developmental discussions with real team members for valuable experience.
- Build muscle memory giving direct feedback both praise and criticism. Discomfort leads to growth.
- Make mistakes. Evaluate what went wrong and how you’d approach differently next time.
Like exercise, building management abilities requires breaking a sweat. Push past your comfort zone.
Set Leadership Growth Goals
Define clear metrics and milestones to meet through continual development:
- Establish specific goals like “provide individualized development feedback to each direct report monthly” or “resolve 90% of conflicts through collaborative discussion.”
- Outline measurable targets for the next quarter/year illustrating your evolution as a leader.
- Track indicators like employee satisfaction, turnover, and team productivity to quantify leadership impact.
- Celebrate hitting milestones while using lags to reassess approaches. Remain a lifelong student.
What’s measured improves. Quantify your leadership trajectory.
Study Positive and Negative Examples
Learn vicariously by observing other founders:
- Take notes when colleagues handle situations effectively that you struggle with. Pattern match techniques.
- Deconstruct why leaders who inspire you resonate. Internalize strengths to emulate.
- Analyse unimpressive leaders’ styles too. Identify pitfalls to avoid.
Experience provides the best education. Extract lessons from the people around you.
Conclusion
Transitioning from engineer to manager takes patience, self-awareness and a commitment to continuous improvement. But through deliberate practice and mentorship, you can evolve into the inspirational leader your startup needs.
Rather than stubbornly power through using sheer effort and brute force, work smarter by developing specialised skills to thrive as an entrepreneur long-term.
The most effective startup founders never stop strengthening their leadership. Their growth enables the company’s growth. Prioritise your own learning in parallel to build a unstoppable team around you.
