Sara Sweat, MA – Founder & CEO, Mindshift Advisors
A founder I knew was on his third start up. He was smart in a way that was so logical and confident, people agreed with him before they’d even thought it through. Detail-oriented, hard working, with a bias for speed that was basically a Formula 1 race car.
His skills had willed two companies into existence on nothing but grit and a refusal to lose. Those companies hadn’t made it for a variety of reasons. But, there were no red flags or serious concerns among them – just the messy realities of startup life. Most of them fail.
The third one was different. It was working, like, really working. This company was sitting right at the edge of the kind of scale that shifts their trajectory and changes a whole industry. Category defining, market disrupting success.
He brought in real C-suite talent to help him take advantage of this opportunity. Every one of them were strong operators with strategic vision. People who’d made this exact climb at other companies and had seen it all before.
And then he didn’t let them run a thing.
He stayed in the weeds on every decision, rewrote the board deck himself so the message stayed “clean”, and began second-guessing the leaders he’d spent months and a fortune recruiting.
He sent emails at all hours, used the company Slack like his personal diary, and monitored everything with such mania that the team stopped doing what they were hired to do – and started working to avoid his wrath.
His oversight wasn’t making anything better. It was holding everything back.
Eighteen months later, the company was half the size it had been. Valuation cut. Momentum gone. He hadn’t run it into the ground. He’d very carefully, though perhaps subconsciously, shrunk it back down to a small enough size for him to control it himself.
He got the company he could run – and lost the company he had built.
The Skill That Got You Here
If you’re a founder, this is the nightmare scenario. Founders who finally find the right idea, at the right time, and manage to assemble an investable team to help them capitalize on it – have basically won the start up lottery.
Not knowing what to do with your winnings is like striking out in the World Series. The chances you’ll get up to bat again are incredibly low. The chances you’ll learn enough from it to even try…even lower.
This founder never stopped being the person who’d built his first two companies. His grit had served him so well, he couldn’t evolve past it. Having grit wasn’t the problem. Not knowing that his greatest strength had become his hidden ceiling was.
He lacked the strategic vision to know which bets to make. His bias for speed shipped half considered solutions that created more problems than they solved. And his customers, whom he quietly resented for wanting things he wasn’t able to deliver, found easier places to do business.
Worst of all, he didn’t actually know why things were failing. He thought he was doing everything right.
Every startup book and HBR article lauded the very strengths he knew he had in spades. But, he lacked the self awareness that would have helped him supplement those strengths with the ones he lacked.
Everybody Thinks They’re Self-Aware
Ask any founder if they’re self-aware and you’ll hear a “yes” before the question leaves your lips. Of course they are. They can name two things they’re bad at on command, usually the same two things they’ve said in every investor meeting for years.
But, that’s not self-awareness. That’s rehearsed humility.
Real self-awareness isn’t polite or pretty. It doesn’t come with an interview ready upside that makes you sound self deprecating while also being braggy. It’s a raw, honest, portrayal of what you’re good at – and where you’re weak. And, it changes all the time.
For example, as will surprise no one who knows me, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. My friends have referred to my expectations as “The Sara Sweat Standard” – as in, there’s good – then there’s great – and then there’s what Sara expects of herself.
But, early in my career, I thought everyone operated that way. I worked hard to keep my customers happy. I would spend hours on my presentations, practice my meeting facilitation, and research everything to be ready for whatever was thrown my way.
When I got promoted to a leadership position, I assumed everyone on my team had been doing the same. They hadn’t.
My peers weren’t putting in half the effort I had been. And, when I found out, all I could see were their flaws. But, I was blind to my own.
I expected my team to do it the way I would have. And, I managed to my process instead of their results. When my mentor saw this, she taught me how to manage to outcomes which was a game changer for me and my team. This new lens empowered us to leverage everyone’s strengths and built a “culture of theft” by stealing the best ideas and leveraging them to our mutual benefit.
Problem solved, right? Blind spot averted. Well…not so much.
The strategy was so successful, that I became obsessed with chasing whatever was getting results. A few months later, I was changing up our processes and training my team on new ones nearly every week. The constant change created confusion and slowness – which distracted us from the essentials and messed with our results.
See, your blind spot is a moving target. And, just like when you’re driving a car, you can’t visualize what’s behind you once and assume you’re good forever. You need mirrors. Constant reflection. People with their eyes on the stretch of road you can’t see. People who will tell you when there’s a semi truck on your six.
Most founders take advice from their investors. They’ll take council from their founder peers. From masterminds and accelerators. But, none of those stakeholders are in your business every day.
Coaches and consultants can be wildly helpful in overcoming your blocks – but even we are partially reliant on your perception of the problems you face.
The surest way to scale your self awareness is to empower your team to keep you briefed. To build a culture of bi-directional feedback that you actually value and use.
True Self Awareness Changes Your Beliefs
That last piece is key. Without it, you’re just adding process and modifying behavior. You learn what to say in the all hands call to motivate the team. You stop interrupting your colleagues – or at least apologize when you do. You quit delivering harsh feedback publicly and stop calling out entire teams on Slack.
But if you still think you know better than everyone else…if you believe the team should value your input more than others, that’s what will still shine through.
If the beliefs motivating your behavior never change, nothing really does.
Your leadership style just reads as disingenuous instead of unhelpful and your team winds up feeling manipulated and hesitant instead of empowered. The moment you’re stressed out, you revert back to your beliefs and the team trusts you less than they did before you “worked on it.”
You have to understand what beliefs are hidden in your blind spot and what’s motivating them to stay there. That’s the self awareness you’re after. The beliefs that are holding you back.
The size and orientation of blind spot beliefs changes founder to founder.
For some it’s a lack of trust that makes delegation impossible. For others it’s a belief that emotions don’t belong at work that’s creating an inability to connect with clients. Maybe it’s a desire to keep everyone happy that’s blinding you to the employees that are no longer a good fit.
In counseling, we say “what does not get healed, gets revealed”. For a business, a founder who cannot see their own motivating beliefs permits them to quietly run the show.
The Only Skill You Can’t Delegate
The founders whose companies 10x are not the smartest people in the room. They aren’t the hardest working or the most innovative or even the best at what they do. They’re the most self-aware.
They know their gaps and re-evaluate them regularly. They create teams that watch their blind spots and make having each other’s backs table stakes for culture. They purposely build infrastructure around their underdeveloped skills instead of remaining blissfully unaware of them or hoping nobody notices.
Scaling your business requires you to be more than you were when you founded it. It requires the first thing you scale to be yourself.
Maybe you’ve got to get out of the weeds and chart your unique course to the future. To not let grit trick you into thinking you can do both. Maybe it’s time to invest in finding the right people and then equipping and trusting them to do what you hired them to do. Maybe it’s finally hiring a coach for something more than prepping for your board meeting & working on what’s impacting the results you’re going to share.
Self-awareness is the only leadership skill you can’t outsource. You can’t hire someone to be responsible for your blind spot and then go back to focusing on what you already know how to do.
This one, you’ve got to own. You’ve got to grow. But, when you do…when you do it well, which I know you can – nothing will stand in your way.
If you want to know what your blind spot is hiding, I’ll give you thirty minutes for free. Tell me what’s happening in your business. I’ll tell you what that blind spot has been hiding.
Mindshift Advisors is consulting for founders who want to leverage human psychology to build extraordinary business results. If you’re ready to amplify your leadership in a way that will matter to your customers and employees, we should talk.
