How to lead yourself so you can lead your company to success
The foundations of personal growth that business owners need to succeed.
Happy December! 👋
We’re almost at the end of this newsletter series on company building. Today’s post is an accumulation of my coaching and business principles, therefore you’ll notice themes that have come up previously such as finding your values, being more productive, managing your perfectionism, ensuring you enjoy your business, navigating the confidence dip, overcoming procrastination, and designing a business strategy based on where you’re going in life.
Keep reading to learn how to lead yourself so you can lead your company to success.
Why company building is the biggest personal growth journey you’ll go on.
When first building The Ask, I first struggled to marry what I saw as two distinct interests (or niches) I had: entrepreneurial careers and personal development.
As I started building my coaching practice however, I no longer had to distinguish between these two fields because I came to see that building a company is one of the biggest personal development journeys you can go on.
How you ‘do’ personal development will determine your business’ trajectory more than any business tactic ever can.
Founders who see personal development as an added item on their to do list (so long as there is time left in the day) are getting it the wrong way around.
To quote Sari Azout (web 3.0 founder and investor):
Companies need financial capital. But they also need emotional capital—good energy, positivity, and resilience.
I believe you can make all the right decisions about product, pricing or your strategy, raise all the money and hire all the best people in the world… but if you can’t manage yourself you can’t manage your company.
This isn’t about expecting the journey to be smooth sailing. Far from it. You will experience lows as a founder, but as we know from the confidence dip, how you navigate such lows not only represents an opportunity for self-improvement but it also creates a hurdle that many people never overcome.
Hard times create a moat around your business, that those who come after you will have to penetrate too. Founders who do hard things gain their hard-earned battle scars which put them ahead of the rest.
My client is building a new service that doesn’t exist in the market yet. She was frustrated by some negative feedback a corporate had given her but as I told her in the coaching session, this is the process she has to go through. To break through and learn something that others don’t know yet and improve her service as a result.
I know that in my business, the clients who have challenged me the most (the ones where results didn’t come as easy), have helped me to see where my approach could serve my clients better, the next time around.
So leading yourself well is about navigating the journey. The good news if you’ve been reading these posts for a while, is that there is nothing new to learn here. You have the information you need to do this as the following advice is not about to reinvent the wheel. It is however, about embedding concepts and actually doing the implementation to see the results.
It requires getting clear (about what you are working on), about thinking clearly (to make decisions and focus) and bringing others along with you.
Get crystal clear on your vision and how you will get there
To lead yourself, you have to set clear parameters for success. Judging your performance requires clear objectives, and these objectives need to ladder up to a big picture of where you’re going and why that matters.
This is about knowing what you are building in your business, and how you are going to do it. I call this clarity and direction setting, and it takes time to get these things straight.
Founders need to dedicate the time to do proper vision and goal-setting, learning their core values, drivers and principles. With these things straight, all decisions become that much clearer.
Often we clarity on the question itself, not just the answer. For example, if you feel stuck or demotivated it might not be clear why that is the case, and in order treat your symptom you’ll need a proper diagnosis.
My business is called The Ask® because of my conviction in the power of asking the right questions, to solve the right problems.
Get good at thinking clearly and you’ll get good at business building.
You can tell if you have clarity of vision if you can clearly articulate
i) what you are building
i) why it needs to exist
iii) what measures of success you are looking out for.
Bonus points if you can also answer the question of why you are the right person to build this company.
My client Jana is building Tiny CFO School and based on her beliefs about the importance of financial education for business owners, and her own skills in finance consultancy earned from working at McKinsey and high growth businesses, she is firm in the conviction that this business is the best expression of her skills and talents and solves a problem she believes in.
Whilst there are so many personal development tips and tricks such as meditation, mindfulness or otherwise, for me, the biggest impact on my mental peace lately has been finding total clarity in what I’m doing and why that matters.
Turning up to my desk each day with focus and certainty has been game changing. Clarity about your vision makes obstacles and set backs an easier pill to swallow because your WHY becomes so much bigger than they are.
Make decisions and use your time wisely
With your vision front and centre, how you get to it matters. Great leaders are great decision makers because good decision making creates short cuts. You can save time both in the decision-making process itself, as well as save time avoiding doing the wrong things.
Whilst you can earn yourself more money you can’t earn yourself more time.
Now dear reader, before you jump into some random pomodoro setting technique (no offence if you do this, I just could never get onboard) I want to offer some big picture context to time management.
Time management requires energy management. This is self-knowledge of how you are wired, where and when you get your energy. Whether that’s to do with the time of day, month or the task itself; observe yourself and see what clicks.
I used to berate myself for not getting up at 7am, doing morning workouts and being in ‘deep work’ from 9-11am. Whilst this sounds ideal my routine in reality is more fluid. Some days I work from bed from the minute I wake up and get lots done before 9am, and other days, like yesterday, I didn’t begin work until 12pm. (That’s why this post is later than usual, and it’s okay if that happens every now and again).
Rather than judge productivity or progress levels based on a number of hours spent per day, judge it based on weekly or monthly output.
Forgive yourself on days you aren’t feeling so great and make up for it on days you’re feeling spritely. When you work for yourself you get to choose how it looks.
But what I do advocate for, is clear frameworks on how you spend your time. Whether it is certain days for certain tasks (time blocking) or percentages on different projects, you want to create some guidelines to follow.
Guidelines avoid second guessing and decide for you so that when you sit down at your desk to work you are not constantly figuring out what your priority is in that moment.
Decide what you will work on before you sit down to do it (the day/week before if possible) and then get on and do it. I call this ‘CEO you’ giving ‘employee you’ their tasks.
One of the biggest time saving hacks you’ll find.
Priorities dictate focus, and your priorities can be decided upon based on your vision, your values, your operating principles and your goals. Priorities also allow you to say ‘no’ to the things that don’t matter (saying no is another awesome time saver, let me tell you) and allow you to find the focus and flow you need to move forward.
Sam Corcos the co-founder and CEO of Levels broke down the first two years of building his company into hours and tracked where his time went.
He advocates for putting everything in the calendar and discarding to-do lists entirely. Sam said in doing so, if someone said to him “Can you have this done by Friday?” that he could easily look at my calendar and respond, “I have exactly two hours open this week, so if it’s going to take more than two hours, we’ll have to change my priorities or I won’t get it done until next week.” He said that this level of clarity on how he spent his time has been a huge win. It’s about the focus on what will move the ball forward and not allowing new shiny objects to detract.
My client Eliza runs an ESG consultancy for high-growth businesses and has managed to work a four day weeks since we started working together. She’s no longer in doubt or procrastinating about the focus of the day either, ever since she has set up systems.
Eliza, like others I’ve worked with, get surprised at the results of better discipline and decision making. So surprised in fact, that it can feel too easy. When things are easy, we may question if we need to be doing more, or something different, and start chasing new shiny objects.
But if its working then it’s working and if you keep playing around with your priorities you won’t learn what works.
Build your foundations carefully and the results will follow.
You also need time to think things through fully and time to explore new challenges as they arise, so be sure to leave white space in your schedule.
To quote Sari again:
It’s taken me a while to warm up to the idea that thinking is working, and that what is actually work can at first look lazy. I love Naval [Ravikant’s tweet], “Be too busy to do coffee while keeping an uncluttered calendar.” More often than not, spending two hours thinking about a problem is a much better use of my time than taking two calls without an agenda, which ends up fragmenting my attention. It’s incredible what you can do in 4-5 hrs a day if you’re working on the right thing. I think people need focus more than they need intensity. The most important question for me is, "How do I want to spend my days?"
Communicate your vision and bring others along on the journey
If everything is going well because you’re clear, you’re focused and getting stuff done then you’ll soon need support as your business baby grows up and achieves things in the world.
They say that it takes a village to raise a child. Well, it definitely takes more than one person to build a company, whether you’re a solo founder or otherwise.
You need to get good at bringing others along the journey with you, whether that’s as a cofounder, a hire, a freelancer or service provider. These people not only help you move faster but they also help out with fresh perspectives, camaraderie and bring specialist knowledge or skills to set you ahead.
Great leaders will lead by example, build the right team based on their own strengths and weaknesses and communicate vision effectively. As founder, you will steer the ship as your supporters help to keep you afloat.
Despite this part involving other people, it is still about you.
The way that you show up to lead others will be as successful as the work you’ve done on yourself.
One of the world’s most renowned startup coaches Alisa Cohn encourages her clients to start with self-awareness first before they work on team leadership. To move the needle on personal development requires making ‘reflection your reflex’. She says, “If you know who you are, you’ll see where you need to get better — and where you might need to hire someone else who is better than you”.
It’s ok to get support in your journey. Most successful founders have teams of advisors, mentors or coaches, it doesn’t have to be a lonely road.
But new people bring new problems if you aren’t in sync.
Get on the same page by ensuring effective communication from the top down. Which, as we’ve explored, requires clarity of vision and priorities.
So get clear on what’s in your head, and get really good at telling that story to others.
I know that when I’ve delegated work, the clearer I am about what I want, the better the result and vice versa. Sounds super obvious but if you’ve ever had a client or boss be ambiguous about what the result they wanted then you’ll know what I’m talking about.
As a leader you have to do the hard work to solve for the end goal, as adding more people to the mix won’t solve the problem. Your ship will lack direction and sink.
Let’s hear from Alisa again:
People regularly feel like they need more communication from the CEO. You think you’ve told people what they need to hear. But they feel like they need more. They want to know the vision — even if it hasn’t changed since the last time you talked about it.
Companies become a mirror of their founder and so its your role to both know your ‘superpower’ and your ‘achilles heel’. After coaching some of the top CEOs in Silicon Valley Alisa sees that the ones who do daily reflection and have a handle on their emotional state are the most effective.
I’d argue that if a CEO of a world leading business can find ten minutes a day to reflect, so can you.
Start with you and watch everything else fall into place.
All of this stuff is why I struggle with being called a ‘business coach’ as although I talk to clients about their businesses, we can only do so from the lens of them as a person.
I’ll be asking through session, how are you showing up, making decisions, and mastering yourself so that you can master the startup journey?
Fellow readers if you have any questions about today’s post feel free to ask. And if you are exploring working with with a coach to get clear and confident in your business then I have two spaces left to begin in December or January. Apply here.
Next week’s post will provide tools on decision making, mastering yourself and getting more done featuring the Founder of Ascend, Shivani Berry.
Ellen Donnelly, Founder + Chief Coach, The Ask.