Recently I had the great pleasure of being guest of honour at Startup Grind in Auckland. We had a very frank Q&A session about the many challenges facing startup entrepreneurs. Some of the discussion revolved around bootstrapping and growing globally. But we also devoted a lot of time to the emotional challenges faced by business founders, because I think this is a topic that we don’t hear enough about.
Entrepreneurship is a hugely demanding calling and few of us get through it entirely unscathed. Along with the daily dramas of driving sales, paying the bills and keeping your team on track, there is the pressing need to balance work and home life. This balance becomes especially difficult if you have young children at home. With the need to put in long hours when starting a business, having the support of your family is critical to entrepreneurial success. So you must engage loved ones in the process early and set some clear expectations.
Funding rounds, media recognition and rolling out the next big software release are exciting and wonderful things, but all of that is fleeting. Family and friends are ultimately what sustain us in the long term – not money, public accolades or brilliant software code. Participating and contributing positively in the community and building authentic familial, personal and professional relationships is infinitely more rewarding.
Creating a palatable work environment is also important. Holacratic workplaces is one controversial approach to addressing this. However, there remains ongoing (and valid) criticisms from within traditional schools of management about whether holacracy can ever succeed. But perhaps the real issue is how you actually define “success” in this context. Tech companies such as Twitter, Medium and Zappos are the most well known proponents of holacracy, within which customer and employee happiness also figures large in company reporting.
At iwantmyname we built a virtually enabled company around a flat structure and uniform remuneration across the company. We engrained an ethos of self-management across the organisation, bringing with it both freedoms and responsibilities. Weaving elements of holacracy into our work setting has been extremely challenging at times and there have certainly been missteps. Whilst very rewarding, it is still a work in progress.
The face of management has evolved very little in the last century within the corporate world, despite the fact that there has been a huge migration away from assembly lines to desk-bound work. But companies that are disrupting traditional business models and leading change have a special responsibility to illuminate the way forward. Finding a suitable balance between home life, personal freedom and the demands of your business is essential to finding the elusive happiness particle.
Paul Spence is a commentator, technology entrepreneur, a co-founder of iwantmyname (a New Zealand based global Internet venture) and a mentor with Startup Weekends. You can follow him on Twitter @GeniusNet or sign up for a free weekly digest of startup, tech and innovation related events curated by him through New Zealand Startup Digest.
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