GKV Feb Update - Founders' Cryptonite

If you’re new here, this is for you:

Disclaimer: You’re getting this because we are friends or acquaintances, family, clients, former classmates or colleagues (maybe two or more of the above). Maybe we just met in the subway once or shared a park bench. Either way, you’re the bee’s knees. But hey, if this isn’t your cup of tea, please feel free to unsubscribe and I promise not to be offended :) Cheers, mate.

—

New Way of Working Together

Putting this out there for any of you why need some help with career pivots and such.

Many of you (20+) have already seen the power of the MindScan over the last 3-4 months for understanding your own inner values and thought patterns.

Yeah, it’s f*cking powerful, nothing less.

I’m still doing free MindScans.

And if you’re fed up with your situation and REALLY need a change YESTERDAY…

Here’s my offer to you:

4 Sessions a month: https://buy.stripe.com/5kA5kx0PCaV26Pu14o

Advanced (2 sessions a month):

https://buy.stripe.com/00gdR31TG3sA2zedRm

Basic (1 session a month): https://buy.stripe.com/00gfZbgOA5AIb5KeVr

Don’t waste precious months and years trying to DIY.

If you want to see your personal MindScan, make time to talk.

—

FOUNDER’S CRYPTONITE – and How to Turn It Into a Superpower

Speed and noise kill. Not just pedestrians, but many startups, too.

Let me explain.

As a leadership coach and CHRO who has worked with, consulted, advised and mentored countless startup founders over the years, I’ve seen an ungodly amount of noise in the startup space and a hell of a lot of aimless speed, just for the sake of movement.

The mantra “move fast and break things” has produced an entire generation (or two) of founders fixated on speed and noise, at all costs.

That is, at the expense of self-awareness and sound judgment in keeping top talent, not just attracting it.

According to the prevailing listicle and podcast wisdom, you must immediately fly off the cliff while building the wings, build a fa?ade and ship half-baked product, or else.

Which often works surprisingly well, until the walls start crumbling, the (proverbial) rats scurry to leave the ship and before the founder knows it, their “baby” has imploded.

I’ve seen it firsthand, especially with first-time founders without much life experience – or time spent on developing themselves as humans, not just professionals.

The results are often not just cringe, but downright ugly. “Bro” culture and group think, impulse hiring and firing, downright unethical and illegal behavior, failing to apologize and course-correct.

One health tech founder I consulted and coached, worked with his wife, mom-in-law and best friend in the business, with all the crazy drama and favoritism, to boot. He had a martyr’s complex to go with a relentless work ethic, leading his wife to force him to step back from the business after they had two kids.

A cookie company CEO I worked with was stuck spending more than half his time on finance and HR, despite being a brand manager, due to a basic inability to ask for help, delegate and automate.

Another first-time founder I worked with (we were friendly from college) was so tone-deaf and inhuman that he purposely prevented an employee he fired from getting unemployment, until his wife intervened. This was the same guy who pretended to be religious just to get an investor check.

An agency executive team I consulted in Medicare Sales brought on several employees and contractors within a month, then promptly fired them all after just 4 weeks, without explanation.

There are the handful of founders and CEOs I worked with that got rid of people on a whim and broke labor laws (and got sued, then lost).

And the list goes on and on.

All that makes poor product-market fit look positively pedestrian.

(No wonder that many VCs are requiring founders they invest in to get a coach or three to help with the mental and physical overwhelm).

In our era of attention as the prevailing currency, attention is very rarely directed inward.

While those who are employees can often skate by until their mid-life crisis, the sheer speed and responsibility of being a founder and employing people, paying outsized bills and holding together what’s often a glorified house of cards, quickly forces founders to “figure it out” or step out of the ring.

Throw in a layer of Gen AI and you have a ton of false confidence that everything is holding together, or very nearly so.

Yet, the constant fires catch up. Quite often, it isn’t a coding bug or even a cash crunch that keeps up founders at night.

It’s the uncertainty of dealing with whole humans, who often act (seemingly) irrationally, get pissed over small things, pull their money, leave for other companies and otherwise “upset the apple cart” and don’t just “fall in line.”

It might be too easy to blame founders for all these things, but the truth is, if startup bros preach “radical responsibility” or whatever else Goggins or Tony Robbins are preaching these days, why not extend it to a founder’s personal responsibility for what happens in his or her company?

And that’s where the rubber hits the road.

Whereas large funding rounds and good PR cover up many deep problems in startups for a while, the messy human reality always catches up.

When things go south, most founders blame customers, investors, the market, rogue employees, the office dog, anything and anyone but themselves.

Until the market, investors, employees, even the office dog all turn that thinking on its head and the founder is out of cash, out of good will, is unceremoniously sacked or left with a steaming pile, holding the proverbial bag.

So what can a founder do to minimize the chances of this awful (but all too common) progression?

No, there’s no magic wand possible, but there are definitely measures one can take to minimize the risk.

More than just the obvious focus on “delegation, automation and outsourcing,” there’s critical awareness of a self a founder much work to gain before anything else.

Are we talking about doing ayahuasca, a mindfulness retreat or taking a vacation here?

No, not precisely, although each of those can help to some degree.

It can be as simple and slow as reading personal development books, daily meditation, regular walks, eating well, sleeping enough.

But these are sadly seen as a “luxury” by most founders in the thick of building at a breakneck pace.

Only when investors, executive teams or family and friends (rarely) “force the issue” are founders forced to reckon with their inner demons, lack of self-knowledge and the resulting toxicity to others they project, as all humans would do in the same situation.

Except the stakes are much higher and the perceived room for error is dramatically smaller.

While most intelligent people cognize that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” (thank you, Ben Franklin), very few actually integrate the principle into their lives in any meaningful sense.

So what do we mean when we say “self-awareness”?

Not a personality test, although those can be helpful.

This refers to understanding one’s thinking patterns, which follow clear patterns. According to Deepak Chopra, we have approximately 65,000 thoughts a day.

For instance, my preferred assessment for helping founders and other execs figure out their thinking – the MindScan – tests 6 dimensions of thinking (3 external and 3 internal) for clarity and bias, including Empathy for Others, Practical Thinking, Structural Thinking, Self-Empathy, Role Awareness and Self-Direction.

In order, these 6 tell us how a person shows up as a Relater (Who Am I / My Being), Doer (What I’m Doing Now) and Thinker (The Way It Should Be).

With a deeper analysis of each, we can quickly diagnose one or a few of the most typical patterns, such as a visionary founder ignoring policies and procedures, a COO missing empathy for others, a CFO rating highly for structural and practical thinking, even for empathy, but low clarity on self-empathy.

With a clear picture in place and a keen understanding of the areas of great clarity and balance (greatest strengths) and also those of lowest clarity and greatest bias (weaknesses), we can quickly create an action plan to address the weaknesses by using the strengths, define and plan for success using SMART goals, then create clear KPIs and drive results.

This can, in turn, be done with team members and an entire company, giving a founder or CEO unparalleled level of detail and – well, clarity – on the overall health of their individual employees’, teams’ and company’s performance, in real time.

As such, self-awareness goes from being a “luxury” reserved for some mythical class of others to a massively valuable, indispensable asset for making business and personal decisions.

In short, MindScan is a business operating system – the only one I’ve found, among others like EOS?, that starts by diagnosing the thinking of humans at the center of the company, rather than auditing the various departments or functions.

When there is a clear system and everyone knows their role to play, mastery can be achieved, enabling speed to accelerate and elevate - rather than destroy - the company.

With that in place, all the noise in the world won’t distract the people involved from building something truly great.

—