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Effective Leadership in Startups

The book The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner (Jossey-Bass, 2002) defines five essential qualities for effective leadership in any organization:
  1. Model the way
  2. Inspire a shared vision
  3. Challenge the process
  4. Enable others to act
  5. Encourage the heart
The key quality that unites all of these characteristics is personal credibility. Although personal credibility is important for leadership at all levels in the organization, it is particularly important in a startup organization, where the culture is young and fragile, and the eventual success of the company depends entirely on the credibility of its initial leadership team and launch product.

Based on my experiences, a leader in a startup organization can establish personal credibility in the following ways:
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  1. Be realistic: While it's important that startups have a long-term vision for the future they want to build, they must also keep their eyes firmly on the road immediately in front of them. Leaders who are "for real" evangelize a future that is attainable in the short term as well as the long term. Effective leaders avoid buzzwords and market hype and focus their energies on a tangible and meaningful path for the organization that delivers value to the customer. A CEO I once worked with put his Photoshop skills to use to create elaborate mockups of future feature-rich products that would not be developed for another 2-3 years, but which provided an impactful and memorable vision of where the existing, relatively de-featured product was evolving.
  2. Be immediate: With a startup, time to market is of the essence, so leaders must establish frequent check-in points with their teams to ensure that nobody goes astray and wastes precious time. Weekly feedback reports are a great way for leaders to keep their pulse on their team's weekly progress, while quarterly performance reviews enable leaders to ensure execution against the long-term vision.
  3. Be there: Almost by definition, the startup experience entails frequent and sudden changes in direction, with the result that projects often extends far into the night and even the early hours of the morning. Effective leaders cannot shield themselves from this reality; they establish credibility by supporting the team. Supporting means not only being physically present through the push to product launch, but also helping out with the "grunt work" -- including ordering dinner, cleaning the coffee pot, triaging bugs, and, most importantly, ensuring morale and motivation are high.