“When you’re the founder, people watch you, mirror you, and follow your lead.”
Alisa Cohn
Whether you like it or not, whether you’re prepared for it or not, the company will be a reflection of you, the founder. Your strengths and aspirations, but also your fears and limitations – unless you get a handle on them.
Leading the company and growing as a leader is an inside-out job that begins with self-awareness.
Once you know and appreciate your strengths and limitations, biases, blind spots, and triggers, you can use that information to build the company and the company culture.
Without self-awareness, we tend to hire people like ourselves. They may bring different technical skills, but they replicate our biases and blind spots. (Remember facial recognition software that couldn’t recognize non-white faces?)
Everything you do, from how you dress for internal and external meetings, to whether or not you swear, to the jokes you tell, to the metaphors you use to describe company dynamics, your behavior serves as the mold for others’ behavior.
Behavior repeated over time becomes the company culture.
You can make space for others to deviate from your model and request to be challenged, but this, too, requires self-awareness – awareness of your behavior and of how that behavior is perceived by others.
If you want to build a strong company culture, don’t start by hiring a “culture expert.” You may want to hire an expert later for help scaling the culture across geographies and large numbers of people, but don’t start there.
Begin by increasing your self-awareness and determining whether the signals you are sending will produce a company that reflects your best self.
As the company grows and your role grows, so will the symbolic power of your actions. The earlier you begin the self-awareness and self-management journey, the more effective you’ll be at creating the outcome you want.
As always, good luck! 🍀
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I work with early-stage startup founders and teams, primarily in the healthcare IT and med device verticals, to lay a strong company foundation that can withstand the stresses of growth. If you would like to learn more about my services and approach, schedule a call to learn more.
