The Problem with a Team of True Believers

Emma was a magnet for “true believers.” When she launched her company, PunchUp, she hired a team of smart, highly-motivated employees who were "all in" on her vision. Emma and her band of true believers lead PunchUp to amazing growth that first year. Along the way, they all got rich.

A few PunchUp employees, however, couldn’t seem to get with the program. They kept making suggestions and raising concerns that didn’t align with Emma’s vision. After a few months of being ignored, they took the hint and found jobs elsewhere.

During its second year, PunchUp was blindsided by FlexFlow, a competitor that took PunchUp’s functionality and added a few key usability features. In retrospect, FlewFlow’s innovation seemed obvious. Emma couldn’t believe that no one on her team had suggested something similar—or at least seen FlexFlow coming.

This problem, called "The Founder's Curse," isn’t limited to tech startups. It can affect non-profit organizations, educational institutions, and even small teams working within a large corporation. The scenario usually plays out in three phases:

1. In the first phase, a talented and charismatic founder launches something (i.e., a company, a team, a political campaign) and succeeds brilliantly. To maximize success, they recruit and reward “true believers”—intelligent, driven employees who can execute the leader’s vision at scale.
2. In the second phase, the team achieves massive success. The “true believers” are rewarded for conforming to the leader’s vision. Creative non-conformists who step outside the lines are ignored or punished by the leader and the rest of the team, so they leave.
3. In the third and final phase, the team faces new challenges. The leader’s initial vision is no longer succeeding and the team desperately needs new ideas to adapt to this new reality. The creative, non-conformist employees who would have provided those ideas, however, are gone. The team has fallen into an intellectual poverty trap in which it is unable to attract or retain the people it needs to ensure its survival.

The researchers in this study analyzed models of charismatic organizations. They found that teams composed of “true believers,” in which conformists were rewarded and non-conformists punished, tended to follow the three-phase scenario described above. The more successful these teams were in the beginning, the more miserably they failed in the long run.

The solution is not to have a team composed entirely of non-conformists, which would have a hard time getting anything done. Rather, the ideal is to have a mix of conformists and non-conformists. Conformists should be rewarded for carrying out the leader’s vision and non-conformists should be rewarded for challenging the status quo and generating new ideas.

Takeaways for the HR Professional

When supporting a team or organization lead by a charismatic leader, encourage the leader to hire and reward a mix of both conformists and non-conformists.

Hiring

Ask candidates behavior-based interview questions in which they share instances in which they had to push back against a leader’s plan or make unpopular suggestions.

If you use personality assessments in the hiring process, look for candidates who demonstrate lower levels of agreeableness or compliance. They may well be the non-conformists who provide the team with the new ideas necessary to ensure its long-term survival.

Leadership

Provide charismatic leaders with training and encouragement to actively seek out differing opinions. This can be done by incorporating devil’s advocate or project pre-mortem exercises.

Retention

Encourage charismatic leaders to reward non-conformity. It may be especially helpful if the leader thanks non-conformers for their new ideas and pushback in front of the group.

Source

Antoci, A., Bruni, L., Russu, P., & Smerilli, A. (2020). The Founder’s Curse: The Stronger the Founder, the Weaker the Organization. Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cnsns.2020.105190