Below is an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here. 

Leadership should be easy if you have a clear vision and you communicate clearly to your team what needs to get done and it will just get done, right? Wrong. Welcome to human behavior in the 21st century. You would be amazed at how hard this can be in the modern workplace. Business is suffering from an accountability crisis in my opinion. It is sometimes hilarious the extent to which some employees will go to avoid accountability or even making the most simple of decisions and how leaders let them get away with it. 

Remember, if your employees are also not owners in the company, there’s little motivation for them to work beyond the bare minimum unless they are incentivized in other ways. I would estimate that 80–90% of employees do not like to be held accountable or go beyond the bare minimum. This is not me being mean or pessimistic, it’s just the new normal and the reason why the definition of a good leader can be different depending on if you’re an owner or employee. Employees often think someone holding them accountable is being a jerk, or at best, too demanding. Ask anyone who manages people for a living, and you will not likely get much disagreement on this. 

Most employees don’t understand the sometimes existential terror of owning a business, making payroll, the threat of lawsuits, being responsible for the livelihood of others, and the dozens of various other issues business owners go through. A lot of people only want their paycheck and to “clock out” at the end of day and not think about work. (And business owners are certainly jealous of this some days!) There’s nothing wrong with this, but we do need to find a good middle-ground between “clocking out” and having basic accountability for the job during working hours. We don’t expect them to be responsible for the company, just accountable for their particular job so you can count on them to get the job done. 

Building an Accountable Team

How do we fix this? Almost every modern book, article, or guru tends to hold the employer responsible for this and recommends all kinds of engagement tools to make people want to do their jobs. I’m sympathetic to this mindset, especially in poorly run companies where you have dysfunctional management, unclear goals, or five different bosses. 

However, I’m going to recommend something radical for a startup with limited resources: Hire people with an accountability mindset from the beginning and then build accountability into your company. You don’t have the time or resources to prod or beg people to do their jobs and deliver on promises; you need people who can get things done correctly and on time.

1. Hire for accountability. If you want people to be accountable, make sure you hire for it. This means putting exactly what needs to get done in the job description along with the standards they will be held to. Mention accountability in the job description, in interviews, and when training. Make it clear this person is accountable for the defined results, and if they do not achieve them, there will be consequences. People who like to be held accountable will usually tell you, and in fact, are eager to demonstrate that. 
2. Define accountability. Related to the above, it would be insane for you to hold someone accountable for something that is not clear, defined, and measurable. Make sure you’ve written and trained on exactly what you expect, what standards you have, and how you will measure them. For example, if you have a receptionist, describe how visitors are to be greeted (what to say, how quickly you greet someone, etc.) and seated, or how phones are to be answered (what to say, number of rings to pick-up, etc.). You can only blame yourself if you’re not clear and haven’t defined correct behavior.
3. Use the language of accountability, and get it in writing. Vague language gets vague results and confuses. Don’t say “get that to me ASAP;” say “I need that by close of business Thursday.” Don’t say “we should fix this;” say “okay, write me up a one-page summary of this problem and your recommended solutions and have to me by close of business Friday via email.” When assigning tasks, make sure you both agree what the final result looks like and it’s written down, whether it’s a final design or 20 cold calls per day, it needs to be something concrete that you can say: Is this done, yes or no? 
4. Reward accountability. There’s a lot of disagreement on the effectiveness of bonuses, gifts, and “spiffs” to employee motivation and accountability, but I believe they are effective if used properly. If you can reward the staff for work done correctly (no missed deadlines or standards) and especially beyond the standard (for example, great client testimonials), then I think that’s one way to help build an accountability mindset in a small business.
5. Correct lack of accountability. Nobody likes to punish anyone, and in fact, I think a lot of accountability problems are the leaders’ fault for allowing bad behavior to continue; they don’t like holding people accountable themselves! As discussed in The New One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard, correction can be as simple as a quick conversation, a written warning, and a well-known, documented “three strikes” rule that means you will likely be terminated if we have to revisit a problem after three times. 
6. Pay and treat them Well. As we’ll discuss more in Step 5, you can’t expect to pay bottom dollar and get top-dollar performance. At the minimum, try to provide the many non-compensation benefits I recommend. If you’re a complete jerk, then you’re going to have a hard time, as we’ve discussed earlier in this chapter. 
7. Teach the Founder Superpowers. As mentioned many times, if you can create a founder mindset in your staff with things like Agency, Productivity, Good Decisions, Good Communication Skills, etc. then they will naturally tend to be more accountable because they will start thinking like a founder, which means thinking like a problem solver.

A depressing fact for employees who don’t like accountability is that outsourcing and other market pressures are only going to make jobs more competitive, so there will be little room to hire people who can’t get the job done. There are literally millions of educated, English-speaking people coming online every year from all over the world, and they’re incredibly eager to work. There are now overseas accountants that charge $5/hour online, yes $5/hour, which is one tenth what I used to pay a bookkeeper just a few years ago.

While I don’t personally prefer this, in the fragile startup phases, you sometimes need to look overseas for the help you need if you cannot find it or afford it domestically. Personally, I recommend building accountability into your organization, and if you can hire great domestic people, they will outperform the overseas employees, and many times the cultural fit is so much better that it’s worth the added expense. Either way, there’s little excuse for hiring staff who don’t believe in accountability.

This was an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here or see our previous excerpts here.

Below is an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here.

Communication can be seen as a way for you to get results, connect with your team, and make sure everyone is one the same page and rowing in the same direction. Good communication skills are critical to a startup; those who cannot communicate quickly, clearly, simply, and effectively will be at a massive disadvantage. A lot of companies are starting to realize that good communication skills, especially written (which is very important in the age of digital and remote communication), is one of the top indicators of an employee’s success. I believe good communication skills are even more important for founders. 

Why is communication important? You might have the clearest vision, solution, expectations, or insight in the world, but if you can’t communicate that to others (customers, employees, vendors, bankers, etc.) then you can’t persuade them to follow you, to understand your point, or why they’re even showing up for work everyday. 

Also, as your company adds people, the complexity of communication explodes exponentially. The book Scaling Up by Verne Harnish discusses this: 

“Think back to when your company was just the founder and an assistant with a plan on the back of a napkin. This start-up situation represents two channels of communication (degrees of complexity), and anyone in a relationship knows that is hard enough. Add a third person (or customer or location or product), and the degree of complexity triples from two to six. Add a fourth, and it quadruples to 24.

Expanding from three to four people grows the team only 33%, yet complexity may increase 400%. And the complexity just keeps growing exponentially. It’s why many business owners often long for the day when the company was just them and an assistant selling a single service.”

If there’s one thing you can expect from a successful CEO (and his or her managers) it’s that they focus on a very few things and tend to say the same things over and over. This is not because they’re boring or close-minded, it’s because they know that they need to repeat these things over and over so they become part of the culture of the company and gets everyone rowing in the same direction, especially as communication gets more complex. 

Communicating things like the company vision and goals, the company values, and the best practices over and over is how you get these things in the DNA of everyone working with you, and it’s effective. It’s why your parents likely said the same things over and over as well and why you can probably quote many of those from memory. 

Finally, a good founder will detect when communications are bad or are going badly (perhaps in a confrontation among your team) and step in to improve the situation or call a time-out for consideration at a later time when things are calmer. 

Writing Skills

Communication skills, especially reading and writing, are becoming more and more valuable for many reasons. Most of our communication is written, more now than ever, even in text messages and chats. It’s also expensive and a huge time waste to have to repeat or clarify yourself and to answer the same questions over and over. If you’ve ever been on an email thread, chat, or text with someone who just “doesn’t get it,” you know how frustrating and wasteful this can be. 

While it solves many quick issues, try to avoid your instinct to pick up the phone so you can develop your written skills. Improving your writing is usually a simple matter of increasing the volume of your writing. Tell your team to put things in writing so they can clarify their ideas and thinking. Writing is so powerful that writing this book actually greatly clarified and simplified many systems I already had in place. Read that again. I’ll provide some helpful information on this in the Chapter Resources. 

Persuasion

There are very few founders who would deny that being persuasive is a great skill to have. Every great salesperson is persuasive, and while it’s not fair, all things being equal, if there are two people competing, the person with the best persuasion skills will get the contract, the sale, the partnership, or even the date. If you’re persuasive, you can probably sell something even before it exists. This is a big part of selling your idea to others, and we’ll revisit this in Step 4. People underestimate the power of persuasion, in my opinion. 

Style and Tone

Electronic communication and social media have been both a blessing and a curse. While these new ways of quickly communicating and connecting have brought about many great things, one thing that has definitely fallen on the wayside is the subtlety of face-to-face and even phone conversations. Here’s an example from Cameron Herold in his book Double Double:

“I didn’t say you were beautiful.” 

Now, I have no idea how you read that in your mind but there are many ways to interpret this text, and it usually depends on the mood of the person reading it. Now, re-read it, but put the emphasis on a different word each time. Example: “I didn’t say you were beautiful” has a much different vibe than “I didn’t say you were beautiful”. 

People will read things in their mood (they may be having a terrible day) and misinterpret even simple sentences, so it’s important to review your communications for tone and how they may be perceived. It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it. 

It still amazes me how short or rude some people communicate these days (even employees); it’s killing your chance at getting what you want (for example, a promotion). At the very least, use basic “please” and “thank you” etiquette every time in written communication to make sure nothing is misunderstood. People have been fired or lost friends for less, believe me; style and tone are important.  

Finally, you as a founder have to set the example and make sure the communications themselves are not overwhelmingly negative to begin with. For example, if you find out your team is not following a clearly written rule or procedure, there are a couple of ways to inform them:

1. You can do an in-person or phone meeting and rip their heads off. The point will be taken and perhaps will stick, but since there’s no written record of it, you can’t reference it again, and your team is probably either scared or mad now, making things worse. They were probably so terrified that most of the message was lost. It wasn’t written, so it’ll likely be forgotten in a week or two, and there’s no record to refer to later. 
2. You can do an in-person or phone meeting and be incredibly nice and gracious. The point will be taken and perhaps will stick, but since there’s no written record of it, you can’t reference it again. Your team may or may not change their behavior, but who cares because you heard one thing and somebody heard something else. Search online for “Yanni vs Laurel” to see what I mean about people hearing different things from the exact same sounds.  
3. You can write the team an email or memo that says, “Hey, geniuses, nobody’s following the XYZ procedure, and I’ve told you like ten times about this. Anyone not following procedure going forward will be terminated.” The point will be taken, and there’s now a nicely written record of you informing everyone (which is good, meaning you can reference it later if the behavior has not changed), but the tone will probably just terrify everyone and likely be counterproductive. 
4. You can write the team an email or memo that says, “Team, we’re having some issues with the XYZ procedure not being followed, and it’s creating problems both for us and our clients. The procedure is attached to this email, and we’ll discuss at our next team meeting. Please be prepared for questions.” This is a) in writing for accountability b) clear and short, explains why the procedure is important c) puts the responsibility on the employee for reading the procedure d) subtly warns that they had better read it and be prepared because we’re discussing it at the next meeting (but does not berate them). That’s when the in-person component will be the most well received and effective. 

Now, Option 4 above doesn’t always work, and that’s when a formal written warning and perhaps even anger may be appropriate. The main point is that effective communicators have a clear, direct, but usually friendly style about them, and this seems to get better results overall. 

Improving Communication Skills

Everybody has their own particular style or preferred method of communicating, and they all can be made effective. Here’s what I’ve learned are the best ways to improve your communication skills. Note that this is always a work in progress (I’ve made huge mistakes on this front), and the key is to keep improving. I know some great CEOs who can communicate in one sentence what can take others a paragraph. That’s a sign of a great communicator. 

1. Same picture in everyone’s head. If I’ve learned anything over many years, it’s that what you know and how you think can be completely different from what your team knows and thinks. Something might be crystal clear to you, and your employees may even say it’s clear to them, but in reality, they have a completely different vision of the concept, idea, project, or task in their head. Knowing this should reinforce how important it is that you make absolutely sure that everyone has the same picture in their head and are talking about the same thing. A good way to do this is to make someone repeat back their interpretation of what is being communicated. 
2. Listen more than you speak. Founders tend to be fast-moving and many have little patience for too much “conversation over action.” Try to overcome this tendency and make sure to listen carefully to people, especially your customers and team. Often, your customers or team won’t speak up unless heavily encouraged (especially introverted employees), so always ask for feedback and for any questions they might have. 
3. Keep it short and simple. The best communicators keep it short and simple for easy understanding by your intended audience, especially in business writing. Remove unnecessary words and information. Don’t overwhelm people with information that is not actionable right away. 
4. Focus on clarity. Ask yourself, “What am I trying to say?” and work from there. 
5. Repetition until it hurts. Your vision, one-sentence strategy, values, principles, best practices, and goals should all be so familiar to your team that they could repeat it word for word. At Amazon, they call these “Jeffisms” because CEO Jeff Bezos endlessly repeats them. 
6. Watch style and tone. As discussed earlier, style and tone can be massively misinterpreted and it’s important to monitor. Light and friendly is best: thanks, no problem, we’ll take care of it, thank you very much, glad to help, sorry, my fault, etc.
7. Be the example and set expectations. If you’re an effective communicator and use proper style and tone, this will filter through your company. Set expectations: If you don’t expect a reply to your emails on weekends, let the team know that. I work best late at night, and everyone knows I don’t expect a reply until their working hours. I’ll call or text if something is urgent. 
8. Over-communicate at first. When starting out a new company, a new job, a new idea, or simply implementing a new policy, lean toward over-communicating so you know the message or ideas are received. You can tweak things later based on feedback or intuition, but this is way better than under-communicating. The billion-dollar merchant account company Stripe requires all their employees to CC a group email address for all internal communications so communication is out in the open and searchable. Employees then learn over time which conversations should be actively monitored or reviewed later.
9. Write things down. As we’ll go over later, writing things down, especially procedures, policies, and FAQs, is a great skill to acquire. There are a lot of “tele-philes” and “in-person conversation” junkies who love to talk all day or use the phone (usually as a crutch for poor written skills), but if you don’t have it written down, there’s no accountability, and you’ll have to repeat yourself over and over until the end of time. Make your team write things down for accountability, and be suspicious of those who resist this. Even an email can be referenced easily. 
10. Make written things discoverable. You’re not a mind-reader and neither is your team or customers. If you get asked the same question more than a few times, then it’s time to put things in writing and post them where they can be easily found. We use an intranet and Google Docs (all searchable) for teams and a thorough, searchable FAQ for our clients on our website. Tip: Have your team set their browsers to an intranet page and post memos, notices, and announcements there instead of email. This keeps announcements “front and center” and unclogs email inboxes.
11. Systemize to reduce unnecessary communication. Jeff Bezos said, “Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.” This may sound counterintuitive, but this is an important point in the world of email, text messages, and constant chat. Too much communication and interruption can massively disrupt workflow and Real Work throughout the organization. It’s important to have clear systems and procedures to handle the never-ending flow of basic questions, clarifications, and expectations of how things work. Writing things down and making them easily discoverable will help reduce the volume of communication and is one reason why they’re critical to a well-functioning business. 
12. Use a daily huddle. You can write things down and be more effective at communication, but this doesn’t stop interruptions throughout the day. The daily huddle is a good solution to this problem. It’s a quick 5–10 minute team meeting (1 minute per person, do a separate meeting for each team) in the morning for everyone to report what they’re working on, and if they’re stuck, have questions on their work for the day, etc. Done properly, this should massively reduce interruptions and issues through the day. 
13. Use communication channel best practices. Not all communication channels are appropriate or ideal for every situation. Learn how your business functions best. Some examples:
    • Chat = Urgent; should last only a few minutes, otherwise the concept is too complex and switch to phones 
    • Email = 2–24 hours (not weekends; use phone/text if something requires weekend interruption). If you need a reply sooner or before close of business, ping via chat.
    • Phone = complex thing easier discussed live, but ping somebody or schedule the call, don’t just interrupt 
    • Urgent/personal to an individual = phone/in-person
    • Urgent to the team = chat via the main or “general” channel
    • Intranet  = not urgent but important for all to see and reminders of memos and updates 
    • Meetings = In-person or video 
14. Use abbreviations and acronyms. One way to speed up communication in your organization dramatically is to abbreviate and shorten long or complex concepts and phrases (this especially helps for speeding up written communication). For example, in my company, our customer management system called “Business Entity Management Application” is just BEMA, “Ready to Process” is RTP, “Turnaround Time” is TAT, etc.   
15. Learn persuasion skills. I’ve never heard someone say they regret getting basic conversation and sales skills, especially a founder. Basic persuasion and sales skills will serve you well throughout life, and are incredibly easy to learn. 
16. Encourage good communication from your team. Coach and help your team improve their communication as well. A poor communicator is almost always a poor-performing employee. If you have to repeatedly ask them to communicate something to others or clarify why they didn’t communicate something properly, then you probably need to start planning for their replacement. 
17. Manage bad communication. Inevitably, there will be a fight, argument, or worse that will require your intervention. Make sure to intervene and de-escalate as quickly as possible. Try to resolve things amicably and get to the root of the problem. 
18. Use righteous anger when necessary. Mostly used as a last resort (and often misused by many as a first resort), and provided you’re doing most of the things above, sometimes people are just not getting the point or understanding the importance of something or are overstepping their authority and righteous anger is justified. “This is not our focus right now” may be ignored but “This is not the fucking focus right now, drop it” conveys a different level of importance. Used sparingly, it can be effective.

This was an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here or see our previous excerpts here.

Below is an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here.  

“Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.” – Peter F. Drucker 

What is Leadership? 

This topic is challenging for a number of reasons. First, the formal definition of leadership, “the action of leading a group of people or an organization,” is pretty obvious but not really useful for our purposes. What we usually mean by Leadership is really Good Leadership where somebody leads a group of people or an organization effectively. 

Further, good leaders get consistent results and Leadership is getting other people to Execute effectively on the Vision (and every leader should have a Vision). Almost everything you read about leadership is a tactic of doing that.

But that leads to the issue of how you define “effectively.” If there’s one thing that’s been a constant source of contention since business and other organizations were invented, it’s that the business owners, shareholders, management, and employees don’t usually agree on what Good Leadership is because it depends on your perspective. (Think unions vs. management.) 

Does a shareholder care if the Leader is inspiring, gets their hands dirty, or has empathy (commonly mentioned traits of good leaders)? Employees may love these things, but a shareholder would be wondering why the CEO is cleaning toilets, working on the assembly line, or crying their heart out about their employees’ problems instead of executing on the company Vision. 

In another example, imagine there is a very laid back and jolly CEO who never really demands much from his staff. There’s little accountability, he pays them well above market rate, gives great benefits, and has almost no expectations or demands in regard to how things are run. Now, this company won’t last long in my opinion (unless they have some “secret sauce” super-profitable business model), but there are many employees who would absolutely love to have a boss like this and would think the CEO was a great leader because their lives were easy and they like the CEO. It’s like the sports team who loves the old, friendly coach who doesn’t demand much from the team, but has never come close to winning a championship. 

On the other hand, you have dozens of famous military generals who are considered great leaders simply because they won battles and wars. It didn’t matter if the troops even remotely liked the general (more likely feared or respected); the fact was that the general won, and that’s what matters in war. After hearing that Ulysses Grant (the ultimately victorious Union general in the Civil War) was a drunk, Abraham Lincoln famously offered to send him and his other generals a barrel of their favorite whiskey. Lincoln (and most presidents, I assume) liked people that won and didn’t necessarily care about how they did it or if the troops thought their general was cool. 

Are Most Great Leaders Jerks?

“There are no wishy-washy rock stars. No wishy-washy astronauts. No wishy-washy Nobel Prize winners. No wishy-washy CEOs.” – Karen Salamansohn, author of Ballsy

As I mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, there’s a big disconnect between what people imagine to be a great leader and the actual leaders that get consistent results. The more I research this topic, the more I find that many of the great CEOs you read about every day are actually pretty insufferable and difficult to work with, not quite the inspirational leaders portrayed in the media. Sure, there are examples of friendly, warm types, but I’m finding out a lot of that was only public relations. It seems most of the greats had what most would consider a pretty demanding demeanor or outright personality flaws.

Almost every new bit of information, even when I was specifically looking for information on the kind-hearted CEOs, ultimately showed that these people, again speaking in generalities, are hard-driven and demanding at the least. Many are, counter to stereotypes, extreme micromanagers. My company deals with entrepreneurs all day, and let me say that they can be very challenging because they’re usually very demanding by nature. 

Here are a few examples, and remember that most of these are founders that started small.

• Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com (these are just a few from the book The Everything Store by Brad Stone): 
  • “As many of his employees will attest, Bezos is extremely difficult to work for. Despite his famously hearty laugh and cheerful public persona, he is capable of the same kind of acerbic outbursts as Apple’s late founder, Steve Jobs, who could terrify any employee who stepped into an elevator with him. Bezos is a micromanager with a limitless spring of new ideas, and he reacts harshly to efforts that don’t meet his rigorous standards.” 
  • “Jeff Bezos fit comfortably into this mold. His manic drive and boldness trumped other conventional leadership ideals, such as building consensus and promoting civility. While he was charming and capable of great humor in public, in private, Bezos could bite an employee’s head right off.“
  • “Bezos was prone to melodramatic temper tantrums that some Amazon employees called, privately, nutters. A colleague failing to meet Bezos’s exacting standards would predictably set off a nutter. If an employee did not have the right answers, or tried to bluff the right answer, or took credit for someone else’s work, or exhibited a whiff of internal politics, or showed any kind of uncertainty or frailty in the heat of battle, the vessel in Bezos’s forehead popped out and his filter fell away. He was capable of both hyperbole and cruelty in these moments, and over the years he delivered some devastating rebukes to employees.” 
• Steve Jobs, founder of Apple: 
  • Fired people in the elevator and fired people in front of other employees on a whim 
  • Screamed at underperforming executives and chewed out employees at all levels of the company
  • He threw a fit about the color of the vans at his company NeXT 
  • There are stories of him berating reporters, doctors, and others for various reasons 
  • He was so demanding and persuasive that people have called his mindset a “reality distortion field” meaning he could basically convince people that anything was possible  
  • “Imagine that your boss told you straight to your face that your project is dog shit. Next, imagine that this boss is Steve Jobs. Thats what happened to me when I was working as the principal engineer of iPhone software during Apple’s golden years.” – Ken Kocienda
• Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft
  • Got into shouting matches with other tech CEOs
  • Has been described as an “office bully” 
  • Argued with his co-founder Paul Allen so badly that Paul described it “like being in hell” 
  • His successor, Steve Ballmer, was famous for throwing chairs across the room 
• Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify, has been described as “patient yet fueled by an internal intensity that can border on ruthlessness.” 
• Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, got into a shoving match with a subordinate because she felt she was not prepared properly for an interview by the subordinate. 
• Andy Grove, founder of Intel, “was known to be so harsh and intimidating that a subordinate once fainted during a performance review”. 
• Elon Musk, founder of SolarCity, SpaceX, and Tesla, has been described as “thin-skinned and short-tempered” and that his version of reality is similar to Steve Jobs—completely distorted. He’s been quoted as saying “not enough of you are working on Saturdays.”

You may be thinking surely this is just a few random CEOs, this is not how most other great leaders operate, right? However, as discussed in the book Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, a thorough analysis of 313 CEOs demonstrated that:

“Boards and investors have a tendency to invest in CEOs who demonstrate openness to feedback, possess great listening skills, and treat people with respect. These are executives who have mastered the soft skills. We call them “Lambs” because these CEOs tend to graze in circles, feeding on the feedback and direction of others. Boards love Lambs because they are so easy to work with, and in fact, in our study Lambs were successful 57 percent of the time.”

That’s a great success rate, well over 50%! This seems to contradict what we’ve discussed, but then there’s this: 

“The second dominant profile that emerged from our analysis was of CEOs who move quickly, act aggressively, work hard, demonstrate persistence, and set high standards and hold people accountable to them. We call these CEOs “Cheetahs” because they are fast and focused. Cheetahs in our study were successful 100 percent of the time. This is not a rounding error. Every single one of them created significant value for their investors.“

So I think my point is clear: Some of the most effective founders and CEOs in the world aren’t exactly the nicest people, and at the least, are pretty demanding. Again, not an excuse to be a raging jerk, but something to keep in mind if people want to guilt you into changing your ways that have proven to be consistently effective. The key is that you must be effective and deliver results to even think you can get away with outrageous behavior. Also, keep in mind that many people that worked for the above-mentioned CEOs absolutely loved them so a lot of the complaints about these people may include a healthy dose of “sour grapes” or even people who were poor performers. 

That said, in modern business, a jerk or someone who is constantly firing people is very unlikely to get consistent results. An egomaniac who can’t communicate or make good decisions is unlikely to get consistent results. Someone who has no idea what they’re doing doesn’t get consistent results. I say “consistent” because anyone can get lucky or bully their way to one accomplishment. But someone who demonstrates leadership does it consistently year after year. They consistently lead their team to achieve the results they aimed for. 

Many Entrepreneurs are Not Natural Leaders

“If you are a highly charged, hard driving, highly successful entrepreneur, then, quite a bit of the time, you aren’t going to be a lot of fun to be around, especially for the thin-skinned. But you should not change. I’ve come to appreciate that the successful entrepreneur is a unique and delicately balanced combination of dysfunctions, bad habits, and personality defects as well as incredible genius, daring, and drive. You don’t want to tinker with that. What works for you works, and you need people around you who can adapt to the strange creature in their midst; you shouldn’t be adapting to suit them.” – Dan Kennedy

Related to the previous topic, I’m just going to come out and say it: A lot of entrepreneurs, including myself, are not great natural leaders, and frankly, can be pretty disagreeable if not outright insufferable. They vastly prefer working on the Vision of the company and working with ideas, products, or customers instead of managing the mundane day-to-day of the business, especially dealing with the management of employees. I want to reiterate that this is not a license to be a jerk (there are a lot of failed jerks out there), just a notice that many entrepreneurs need to be careful when taking leadership because it might be difficult for them because others usually don’t think like them and that tends to cause frustration. 

The good news is that even the most aloof entrepreneur can learn the basics of leadership, at least until they can hire a “people person” who can take the day-to-day management of the company to the next level. Personally, it took me way too long to pick up the basics, and I still struggle, but after 17 years of consistent profits, growth, and making the INC5000, I’ve realized that I’ve reached the limits of my leadership abilities and need to step aside to focus on what I’m good at and hire someone who actually likes running the day-to-day of the business. Great serial entrepreneurs know this and will hand off their startups as soon as they can. 

The book Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman goes deeply into this dynamic by separating what he calls Visionaries from Integrators. The Visionary is almost always the entrepreneur who founded the company and typically gets overwhelmed or impatient with the management of the company and dislikes “chasing squirrels” and managing people. An Integrator, on the other hand, absolutely loves managing people: motivating, coaching, and holding them accountable. If this situation sounds familiar to you, then you’ll want to look into hiring an Integrator sooner rather than later, certainly before 17 years go by. Some people are both a Visionary and an Integrator but this is extremely rare. 

So What is Great Leadership? 

For our purposes in a startup, I think we need to consider both perspectives when defining a good leader: the consistent desired results they achieve (which is what the owner and shareholders care about) and how effective they are at getting their team to want to achieve those results. If the team admires or even likes the leader, than that’s even better, but none of those things really matter if you’re not getting results (and especially if you go out of business because then nobody has a job). Or to put it simply, we need results, but we need to remember employees are real human beings, and their opinion and motivation should matter if you want to build a great company. 

Also, there are so many effective leadership styles that it’s important you find your own that works best for you. There’s the stereotypical outgoing “people person” leader who can rally the team to a great cause, the general who gives the rousing speech to the troops. Then there’s people like myself who realize I’ll never be that “people person” but work with what I am good at and try to focus on solving problems, creating clear goals, and removing roadblocks for my team. I think many different styles of leadership can be effective, so don’t limit yourself to the stereotypes you see in media or read about in books. 

So, where am I going with all of this? I’m defining Leadership so that it is clear and also identifying the Leadership Superpowers so you can effectively learn them. If you struggle with some of them, then you may need to hire someone else to manage and lead your company at some point. 

That said, I believe these are the Leadership Superpowers:

• Superpower #13: Good Communication Skills
• Superpower #14: Accountability Mindset
• Superpower #15: Team Development and Motivation
• Superpower #16: Courage to be Disliked

This was an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here or see our previous excerpts here.

Below is an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here. 

“It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” – Albert Einstein

Closely related to Decision Making is the thing that many founders and CEOs are legendary for: Problem Solving. As we go through these superpowers, you can see a pattern that goes from Vision to Execution. As we Execute our Vision we will run into all sorts of decisions, hence the need to learn Good Decisions. However, we will always encounter problems along the way, so Problem Solving is critical to Execution. In fact, all of the Superpowers in this book can be considered one part of Problem Solving because that’s typically what an entrepreneur does for a living. 

In general, the Problem Solving process is pretty basic, but the skills required can vary depending on the problem.

1. See the problem. Believe it or not, I’ve encountered entrepreneurs that can’t even see the problem. Either they don’t recognize it or are willingly ignoring it. Sometimes, their staff or customers won’t report anything, which is a separate issue to address. See Step 5 for some solutions to that. 
2. Define the problem. This can be harder than it sounds. For example, is this customer complaint the result of one bad decision or something systemic in how we operate? It’s important to get to the source of the issue and properly define it. A great tool to help identify issues is known as 5 Whys. You start by asking Why the problem happened and to each answer you ask Why again up to 5 times. This tends to get you much closer to the root of the problem. 
3. Generate solutions. Brainstorm solutions to the problem. This may be fairly simple or require specialized knowledge. The more competent brains (who properly understand the problem) you can get working on the solution, the better. Sometimes the solution, believe it or not, is to ignore the problem if it’s not worth fixing, can’t be fixed, or is too difficult to fix. Good problem solvers know when something is worth using resources to fix. 
4. Implement and follow up. Implement your solution and make sure it works by following up to make sure the problem is actually solved. 

This was an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here or see our previous excerpts here.

Below is an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here. 

“Decision-making is everything. In fact, someone who makes decisions right 80% of the time instead of 70% of the time will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more.” – Naval Ravikant

It took me many years to understand the power of somebody who makes good decisions. Get good at making decisions and you almost cannot lose in business or in life. I’m dead serious about this, so please pay attention. Think about it; life is just a series of decisions from what to eat, who to associate with, where to go to school, who to marry, who to go into business with, what marketing strategy to use, etc. 

If you can make good decisions and consistently get better at that, then you will mostly avoid the landmines and bad choices that have doomed other people and businesses. Good decisions are basically a “cheat code” for life. Venture capitalists also throw piles of cash at people known for good decisions. Even a 5% better record of good decisions has massive exponential returns in business and in life. 

So, how do you make good decisions? The obvious and funniest answer is “by making bad decisions,” but that’s not entirely correct. You make good decisions by learning from your bad decisions. A lot of people never learn from their mistakes. You know these types, and they usually live tragic lives. You also need to take the time to learn about and use good decision-making tools. Again I will mention how powerful even an hour or two of simple planning and thinking through decisions can dramatically improve your life. 

A lot of people go through life from one bad decision to another, not really thinking they have any control, then blaming anything or anyone but themselves for their outcomes. Most people get their decision skills from their parents, for better or worse. 

More and more, we’re learning that just avoiding the bad decisions in life (drinking/drugs, bad diet, anger/violence, bad relationships/divorce, excessive debt, not planning, etc.) will easily put you in the top 20% of a number of important metrics like wealth, happiness, longevity, and so on. A lot of decision-making is simply not making some big mistakes as I mentioned in the introduction.

Here are some top landmines and bad decisions that have destroyed countless companies, especially in the fragile startup phase:

• Disagreements and arguments amongst founders 
• Bad financial planning or running out of cash 
• Lack of financial controls in the business 
• Ignoring your market or your customers feedback 
• Not learning and applying new skills 
• Not getting things in writing 
• Anger: treating employees, vendors, or customers poorly (leading to lawsuits) 
• Ego: not letting something go or going legal for all the wrong reasons (like hurt feelings) 
• Not taking care of your health 
• Skirting or working on the edges of the law 
• Not planning anything (especially exit or succession) and not documenting your business 
• Excessive socializing or getting romantically involved with people at the workplace 

Making Good Decisions

Let’s go over some basics of good decision-making that I’ve learned and shamelessly stolen from great decision-makers over the years. The best decision-makers use some of these tools as well as intuition built from years of making good decisions. One tends to get better and better as you internalize these principles.

1. Decisiveness. You don’t have much time in business to wait, so you need to place a sense of urgency on making decisions. You’ll likely never have 100% of the information you need to make the decision. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, says, “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.” 
2. Be conscious and aware of decisions. A lot of people go through life on autopilot. These decisions include what to eat and how to take care of your body (over the long term), what to learn, what to focus on, who to marry, who to work with, where to move, and similarly important decisions that can potentially have a big impact on your life. Pay attention. 
3. Be deliberate. Set aside some dedicated time to actually think through a big decision, collect the information (opinions of others you trust especially) you need, and put things in writing. Writing equals clarity. Sometimes, even thirty minutes of dedicated time can bring about massive clarity. Also, make sure you’re relaxed and not under too much stress. Finally, act like you’re deciding for a loved one instead of yourself to help take out any biases (e.g.: you may be too easy or too hard on yourself). 
4. Reversible or not? Jeff Bezos has what he calls Type 1 decisions that are not reversible and you need to take great care in making them. Type 2 decisions can be reversed, so you don’t need to overthink them; you can take the plunge and correct course later. It’s important not to confuse the two types because it’s silly to waste too much time on a Type 2 decision. A Type 1 decision would be completely changing your company’s name, products, and services whereas a Type 2 decision would be adding a new product or service. At the least, Type 1 decisions should be tested before jumping in feet first. 
5. Pros and cons. Everyone is familiar with this tool but most don’t really use it. This is a helpful first swipe attempt at making a decision that has many factors. One way is to make a lists of pros and cons, but it seems that even writing out a story or narrative will make you think through the issue in a more complete manner. Sometimes, this alone can make a decision very clear. The author Seymour Schulich likes to take this one step further and assign each pro and con a score from 1–10. Tally the scores and if there are at least twice as many pros as cons, then it’s likely something that should be chosen. 
6. Second-Order thinking. It’s amazing to see, but most people don’t really think through what will happen after they make their decision. Often, your team won’t understand why you’re rejecting an otherwise “obvious” action. Good decision makers are always thinking “then what happens?” over and over when contemplating a choice so they can anticipate the effects of their decision. First-order thinking is only thinking about the immediate effects and can miss out on potentially devastating after effects. Try to think out several months or even years ahead. For example, it sounds great that we’re going to focus on a new market, but if we do that, what will happen to our existing market, revenue, focus, what will our existing clients think, what will our vendors do, etc. 
7. “Hell yeah! or no.” Serial entrepreneur Derek Sivers recommends this principle, especially if you are already busy or over-committed. Unless it’s something that you would say “hell yeah” to, then pass and maintain focus on your existing priorities. The successful entrepreneur Naval Ravikant further clarifies his tough decisions with the rule: “If you can’t decide, the answer is no.”
8. Jeff Bezos’ regret minimization framework. Again, Jeff Bezos shows how much effort he puts into decisions with this one: We can never predict the outcome of a decision, but we can severely regret never having tried. Bezos likes to project himself forward in time to 80 years old and see if he may regret missing out on the potential upside of a decision. For example, he thought he would massively regret not trying to open an ecommerce business in the early stages of the Internet.  
9. Choose the more painful choice in the short term. Naval Ravikant has realized over time that almost all long-term gain comes from short-term pain (exercising, eating better, planning, saving, etc.). So if you have two choices to make and they are relatively equal, then choose the one with the most short-term pain, and that’s likely to have the best long-term gains. Absolutely brilliant. 
10. Think from first principles. This is an advanced tool, but great entrepreneurs like Elon Musk take decisions a step further and even question the assumptions behind the possible choices. For example, when he knew he needed a cheaper battery to make his electric cars affordable, he didn’t simply limit his choice as where to acquire a cheaper battery. Instead, he and his team broke down all of the construction and materials in a battery and found they could actually construct one far better, cheaper, and longer lasting than was currently available. This is taking a problem and thinking in first principles, try to take the assumptions down to the basics and work from there. 
11. Adopt Core Values and Principles. Written values and principles for yourself (as well as your company) can make many decisions easier. For example, if you’ve adopted a core value of “Simplicity” and the decision is whether to add a layer of complexity to a service or process, the core value tends to help you decide if that’s the correct way to go. I’ll go more into this topic in Step 6.  
12. Use a decision journal. As previously mentioned, learning from your bad decisions is an easy way to prevent a lot of problems. However, a lot of various human biases sneak in and over time they tend to dismiss the failures and exaggerate the successes and the reasoning behind them. Simply keeping track of your big decisions in writing (keep one file for “decisions”) and noting how they went later will give you huge insight into how to keep getting better at decisions and prevents your biased brain from deceiving you. 
13. Listen to your gut. Don’t discount the thousands of data points that your subconscious is constantly monitoring and giving you signals about. If someone seems distrustful, then be aware of that. If you get a bad feeling about a deal or person, then take that into consideration. Our gut has powerful instincts, so don’t ignore them. Differentiate between a “bad gut feeling” (something doesn’t feel right) and fear (totally normal). 

Hopefully, I’ve conveyed the importance of decisions and how you can keep getting better at them. The simple fact that Jeff Bezos appears so much throughout the list above should demonstrate that the world’s richest man (as of this writing) places an enormous value on making good decisions and so should you. 

This was an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here or see our previous excerpts here.