Small Habits Co-Founders Can Hang On to as They Build the Plane While Flying It
Lucinda worked with the two co-founders of an AI company over several years. In this article, they describe their valuable experience working with Lucinda as a team.
Excerpt:
Picture this: You and your co-founder are in the throes of a debate you’ve had several times. You don’t feel like you are being heard, and on the flip side, you don’t want to compromise on a decision. Sounds like a case for couple’s therapy right? At Labelbox, the solution to this conundrum wasn’t too far off.
It’s quite typical these days for founders or company leaders to work with an executive coach to sharpen up their leadership skills and manage any stress or overwhelming feelings that come with the high-stakes job. When Labelbox was starting out, this was the route Sharma and Rieger opted to take. “We were lucky to have been told within the first six months of Labelbox to get a coach, and we did,” says Rieger.
What’s decidedly less common is to bring in a shared executive coach that works with your whole co-founding team. But Sharma and Rieger swear by it. They break down how their executive coach provided value in each stage of their company’s life:
Develop new leadership skills
For founders who are switching from an IC role to an executive role for the first time, navigating that change can be daunting. An executive coach brought in during the early stages can work with each founder individually to help develop their leadership skills and ease them into a people managing position.
"For the first few years at Labelbox, my coach was very impactful in rapid leadership development for me," says Rieger. "I had only been an engineer for my entire career. I didn’t know a lot about how to be a leader."
It seemed like this dark art or magic. My coach helped me put that into defined skills and outcomes and made it more tangible," Rieger says.
Align on misalignment
Once Sharma and Rieger felt their individual leadership skills were in a good place, they decided to shed their separate coaches and ended up using Rieger’s for joint sessions. Nearly all of these joint conversations centered around alignment, with the realization that how each founder approaches a problem is more powerful than the decision they ultimately reach.
Rieger and Sharma suggest using a joint session to learn how each co-founder tackles a problem head-on. For example, Sharma learned that Rieger takes a more methodical approach to solving problems and needs space to digest and work with a problem, rather than attack it straight away (which is Sharma’s preferred M.O.).
“These are very different ways of dealing with problems and if I'm expecting Brian to solve problems in a constrained timeline that I'm projecting, obviously we will have a disconnect and misalignment of expectations,” Sharma says.
Here are a few more habits Rieger and Sharma practice regularly to make working with their coach more effective:
Find a realistic cadence.
“We get together once a month with our coach, and it is our time to bring the hairiest problems that we are experiencing in our company that could be solved by working together,” Sharma says. “It’s through that joint session we’re able to rapidly arrive at a common understanding that we might not be able to do independently.”
Nip it in the bud.
Another positive impact of shared coaching is having a third-party mediator on-hand to help your co-founding team squash any disagreements that come up. “In the joint coaching session, we're able to ask questions to each other and validate or invalidate our hypothesis very quickly,” Sharma says. “Our coach is not only mediating that but going multiple layers deeper into anything that we perceive of each other.” This ultimately helps the two reach decisions faster.
