It’s amazing how quickly a business can change. In just a few months, the nature of my role can shift completely: there can be a much larger team to oversee and a range of new challenges to tackle.

I might have my head down making technical decisions for half of the year, but in the next half I’m working to raise capital with my co-founder. Then, in the blink of an eye, I’m leading at scale and developing a whole technical leadership team. None of these activities have fallen under my remit before, but I have to make an impact straight away.

As a founder, this need to constantly evolve is thrilling. But there’s a hidden cost too.

Throughout the years, I have put off difficult decisions in certain situations because, quite honestly, I wasn’t confident enough to make them. I’ve also had to make calls on whether I should promote people early, as there was an urgent need to fill a position. Of course, a lot of thought was put into these decisions alongside careful consideration for the people involved. We had to keep the company moving forward.

But this is how, as a leader, I have accrued what I term ‘leadership debt’. It’s similar to technical debt – where companies amass costs from not updating their technology – but from an organisational perspective. And without action or awareness, it can build over time.

The start is all ‘do, do, do’

The early stages of growing a startup involve hiring the best individual talent available, the sort of individuals who can effortlessly overcome ‘the impossible’ and work fast. These are the doers. When building at full tilt, you need the fixers and code breakers – the people who instinctively know how to solve a problem or work to a solution. Here, anything seems achievable.

With such a small and close-knit team, there isn’t a need for much management or structural leadership. Everyone’s on the same page, working in the same space and aligned on the same ambitions.

The first world of leadership debt: accidental managers

If all goes to plan, the business expands. But who’s going to lead any new teams? Who will be the managers and department heads?

The first port of call is to consider your early doers. Their knowledge of the product is unmatched. They’ve got the company to where it is and created trust throughout the business. So, they become accidental managers, promoted without any preparation or training.

Yet delegating tasks, coaching employees and managing performance are very different skillsets. A doer is not necessarily a leader. There will be some accidental managers who take to it instantly. Others, however, might find it too much. And there are of course the people who don’t want to lead anyway. They are happy, and best, as builders.

The second world: seasoned leaders

So, leadership debt is already building. Meanwhile, continuous high growth eventually means you have to enlist seasoned leaders who know how to scale. Their experience enables them to see two steps ahead and navigate complexity on a large scale. Crucially, they provide structure, methods, processes and a forward-looking approach.

But now, two leadership worlds are colliding. The seasoned leaders have the experience of heading up big teams and the practicalities of scaling. The accidental managers have been there from the outset putting out the very first fires, and carry the institutional culture and knowledge.

This is a key moment. You don’t want either side to undervalue the other. If integration is not considered, seasoned leaders might overlook the contextual understanding and inventiveness the accidental managers have. Accidental managers might feel less appreciated or shoved to one side.

If this friction emerges, valuable employees can leave, trust can fall, and execution can stagnate.

Bridging the two worlds

Rather than swapping one type of leader with another, servicing leadership debt involves rebuilding trust when needed and supporting leaders to adapt to change. Bridging the two worlds rests on a mix of empathy and time. How can we create space for contrasting leadership styles to coexist and evolve?

Startups are generally very fluid and fast-paced but unstructured. So, new leaders often bring crucial insights and know-how from previous structured environments. They can deliver a sense of scale and bring clarity and process to the company. However, if they introduce this way of working without taking the time to know the company’s backstory and the environment that has shaped it, it’s likely to backfire.

The most skilled new leaders actively prioritise listening, watching and learning from those accidental managers who have played an active role in the company since the beginning.

The same adaptation applies to some of our earliest leaders. They’re finding out that the strategies that worked perfectly for 50 people suddenly creak under the pressure of more staff and greater complexity. They don’t need to rip up these methods, but must modify them. It’s a combination of leaning on the insights of seasoned leaders who have produced success elsewhere and learning what ‘good’ is at this expanded stage.

In my own work at Semble, the task of bridging these two worlds carries an even greater responsibility. There’s no decision we make, including who becomes a leader, that doesn’t have an effect on a patient. So while important, we’re not just trying to build a streamlined organisational structure – we’re creating a company with the right leaders in place to help us better serve patients every day.

The driving force behind all of our work is a bold mission and a collaborative culture.

If we have a new leader, for example, we don’t just give them the job. They complete a personalised onboarding checklist and embark on listening tours to gain an insight into how we work, our culture and, crucially, the passion and care we have for our users.

Empathy also lies at the heart of our operations. To reinforce this value, we implement several key actions. Any new starter takes part in our onboarding programme First Shot, and will visit customer clinics on-site as part of this. We run workshops across the company that highlight the healthcare practices that depend on us every single day. Our leaders also have the chance to role-play setting up a clinic and put themselves in the shoes of our users.

For us, ‘impact’ is not another buzzword. It sets up how we steer leadership and provides the people working nearest to our product with clarity on decision-making and outcomes.

A lot of energy, time and deliberate effort is needed. But this direction allows us to repay leadership debt.

When we get it right, we get the best of both worlds: the knowledge and history of the accidental managers coupled with the process and experience of the seasoned leaders. This allows us to grow while not forgetting who we are. And that means we keep the beating heart of the company alive.

Written by Mikael Landau, co-founder and CTO at Semble

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