Driver:
The Driver’s Manual:
Tell Your Team to Fasten Their Seatbelts!

Drivers drive! If you’re a Driver, your intensity is grounded in your confidence that the products and services you’re bringing to the market are exactly what the market needs (even if sometimes it hasn’t been looking for them). You see market acceptance almost as a form of personal validation. Your expectation of perfection is not a great fit for some team members, while others find it inspiring.

Drivers expect a lot from their followers. Like a demanding coach who pushes his or her team to redouble their practice intensity or yells at a player on the sidelines for missing an assignment on the court, you can be a harsh taskmaster. Sometimes that rough style can yield victories worth the pain and embarrassment along the way. But your team members can’t expect a lot of TLC with you as their business builder.

Working with and for Drivers often takes something that probably doesn’t show up on most candidates’ résumés: a very thick skin. As a Driver, you can be particularly tough on the people around you. Your single-mindedness can compromise your sensitivity to others’ feelings and pride. You may have already been surprised when you lost a valued colleague who left because of a bruised ego.

A Driver’s organization may not be the best place to work for someone who considers work just a job, deriving deeper life satisfaction outside the workplace. As a Driver, you often expect everyone to be as driven and perfectionistic as you are. You run a tight ship, with exacting performance expectations. This environment tends to fit those who see themselves as experts and are comfortable working as individual contributors. Your best team members may be on either end of their career arc—more-senior people accustomed to this kind of culture or apprentices willing to work in a demanding environment as the price of learning new skills they desire.

As a Driver, you tend not to be focused on ensuring an open, collaborative, and flexible culture in your organization. In your impatient search for results and accountability, you tend to ignore usual chains of command—a habit that can catch your lieutenants off guard. You may allow an implicit hierarchy to develop according to expertise, impact, and drive, with those who demonstrate all three becoming elevated both formally and informally within the organization.

Your most valuable followers are those who have earned your trust by meeting your tough expectations across initiatives and over time. Perhaps those individuals have contributed something unique to your company’s market understanding, product differentiation, or both.

While not necessarily admitting it even to yourself, you may view most other followers as dispensable resources rather than genuine collaborators in a shared endeavor. You are likely to have the “what have you done for me lately?” question in the back of your mind in dealing with rank-and-file employees. So figure out how you define and measure success in ways potential team members can understand. Is it sales, profits, growth, market share, or valuation relative to competitors? Or is it industry recognition, personal wealth, or some other metric?

While every builder wants success, Drivers crave it. You can be abrupt and impatient when faced with performance results that don’t match your ambitions. However, if your team members can stand, or maybe even enjoy, the sometimes white-hot intensity that comes from working close to your preferred metrics, they may earn a seat in your vehicle . . . and maybe even ride shotgun.

The Explorer’s Lab:
Assembling the Right Crew to Crack the Next Code

As an Explorer, you prefer employees who share your practical curiosity and commitment to finding commercially viable, clever solutions to big customer problems. But you can get bored with the more routine aspects of your company’s operations, however necessary they may be to the success of the business. So what kind of crew might fit your personality best?

As with the Driver, your organization is not ideally suited for the it’s-just-a-job view of employment. Explorers have high expectations, and your systems thinking pervades almost every interaction. This cultural expectation translates into a work environment more suited to team members who derive their life satisfaction from work. Because cracking the code is everything to you as an Explorer, you can create exciting team and individual contributor cultures, but they tend not be all that nurturing.

Expertise and knowledge reign supreme. So this is not an ideal place for an apprentice, unless he or she is willing to be a dutiful student, learns quickly, and has a tough skin when it comes to inevitable rookie mistakes. Senior functional experts, on the other hand, represent ideal members of your team, as they can provide support in key areas that don’t interest you but which are key to scaling the enterprise.

You need a crew comfortable with tough intellectual competition. Because you don’t suffer fools lightly, your people need to show their stuff to establish credibility in their domain. Solutions count—they’re the currency of your realm.

You don’t want team members to be your clones. You will need, if not always appreciate, analytical creativity and tenacity from other disciplinary backgrounds as your enterprise grows. In fact, team members skilled in areas outside your own personal interest zone—perhaps like HR, supply-chain management, or finance—may get far more freedom working in your organization. That can translate into a wonderful recruiting tool for you to bring exceptional talent onto your team in those domains.

If you really need to master one of these areas in your company for your own comfort level, fine. But beware—your questioning can come across as second-guessing and eroding the esprit de corps and mutual accountability that are the hallmarks of highly functioning teams.

Regardless of your own prowess as an Explorer, you need others’ skill sets to fully realize the potential of the product, technology, and service solutions you and your core team of puzzle solvers have developed. Sometimes the growth of your business will depend more on people who can replicate the solution you’ve already produced than on colleagues who can help you solve the next puzzle. And look for team members who can keep things moving, pay the bills, deal with the staff, make deliveries on time, and keep customers happy. This will free you up to stay focused on cracking the next code.

Crusaders Need Intrepid Missionaries:
Sharing and Carrying Your Flag

If you’re a Crusader, you’re a big-picture leader. You focus on the overarching mission of your organization and want employees aligned with that higher-order agenda. Second only to your Captain cousins, you pride yourself on the loyal band of followers you’ve attracted to your cause. But as a Crusader, you need more than just loyal followers. You also need functional experts to operationalize and scale your mission—team members who are well into the arc of their careers, especially in areas like finance, operations, or HR, which may not be your natural sweet spot.

You need people around you who have the tenacity and dedication worthy of the crusade you are leading. That means looking for individuals willing to invest more than just time in their job. Ideal team members for a Crusader see their work as a part of how they define themselves; they are fully bought into your firm’s vision for impact. These employees must be able to thrive in the kind of free-form work environments you often prefer—reinforced by your belief in nurturing individuals, working together, and learning through personal relationships with one another.

Your ideal candidate’s motivation for joining forces with you should be the appeal of your crusade. However, they should also be comfortable with a fair amount of ambiguity, while having a strong do-it-yourself initiative.

As a Crusader, you may be vulnerable to a hiring pitfall we have noticed with many of your Builder Personality Type. Crusaders can mistake personal loyalty and commitment to the mission for competency. If you are a Crusader hiring for a skill-intensive discipline, get input and support from a board member or another expert who can probe each candidate on the technical competency required for the position.

Your team members may find themselves frustrated from time to time with your difficulty in translating their genuine zeal into the day-to-day details necessary to achieve the core mission you share. Sometimes, a solution to this frustration is as basic as working backward from the mission statement and showing how your team’s everyday activities can noticeably improve or accelerate this goal. In other words, show your team members how they can wrap themselves in the flag of your business. Other times, it may require the more detailed kind of operational planning any team needs.

Be prepared to press the flesh with your new recruits, and remind your veterans of how important their work is to the cause and business you champion. They need to feel they’re sharing, if not carrying, the same flag as you. If you are a Crusader, your employees can feel at times that working for you is a wild ride, but your gut instinct or vision is also probably one reason they signed up for your crusade in the first place.

Getting Your Captain Signals Straight:
In the Huddle and on the Field

People tapped by a Captain to join a team are fortunate. As a Captain, you are by nature comfortable with, and committed to, positive team dynamics in building your venture. But like any Captain committed to phenomenal results, you demand performance across the team that matches your expectations. You challenge as well as motivate and support players on your teams. This means you are capable of working well with team members at various places in their careers: eager apprentices, people seeking a leader role model, or people further along in their careers, seeking the ideal assignment to apply their skills.

Given your team focus, Captain-led businesses are arguably the best developers of talent across functions and tenure. While you may tolerate more free-form cultures and styles, make sure your colleagues do not mistake what appears to be greater flexibility for a lack of accountability and role clarity. These two tools—accountability and role clarity—are among the sharpest in your kit, and you tend to use them swiftly in removing underperformers.

You recruit for and expect collaboration in both servicing the customer and advancing the company’s interest. In return, you create supportive environments in which individuals can learn and continually improve.

Morale matters to you, as does culture. Reconciling your team ethic with your high-results expectations is a continuing challenge for both you and your team. The phrase “iron fist in the velvet glove” comes close to capturing these two sides of your approach to leadership.

As a Captain, you are not looking for groupthink or some campfire Kumbaya bond with your team members; you just seek an effective way to harmonize and leverage their collective capabilities to go after the challenge ahead. This balancing of the nurturing side with high expectations helps you hold team members personally accountable for their results.

You are probably the best listener among our builder quartet. For this reason, members of your crew are more likely to have their opinions and ideas solicited and heard. Hopefully, they will take advantage of that open door.

We call your type of builder a Captain, because you are on the field with the rest of your team. You’re a bit more like a player-coach—deciding plays, making substitutions, sizing up the game, shoring up morale, but also running plays in real time. Working in this kind of setting can be exhilarating for your team members because of the opportunity and visibility that can come from interacting with such an engaged builder.

But you need to reinforce the message that their invitation to your Captain’s huddle is easily revocable if their prowess on the field declines noticeably. Your message is clear—nothing personal, just keep doing your job!

Talent Management for All Builder Types

Of course there are other factors at play for certain positions you will fill in building and scaling your company. The following advice pertains to an overarching talent management strategy.

• As we indicated above, as a Driver or an Explorer, you can be a good mentor for like-minded young talent wired similarly to you and committed to work through your high expectations and blunt feedback to become more skilled. As you scale your business, the key question is whether you hire and reward your management team to do the same and to instill this form of mentorship as a core value of your company. We have seen many examples of companies that mentor and those that do not, but those who make mentoring a key priority tend to scale more easily.
• Crusaders often create supportive, collaborative learning environments, which can be ideal for growing young talent. That said, the deep competency and commitment to mentoring within each discipline must be in place for you to realize your dream of being a learning environment.
• As mentioned above, as a Captain, you are likely to create an environment in which both young and more senior, experienced managers can thrive. You are adept at placing people in positions that stretch them, but not to the breaking point. Consequently, your management team has probably taken on this skill and builds talent from within. Although you may use a velvet glove when recruiting and nurturing talent, make sure prospective candidates know your supportive approach is anchored in a strong emphasis on accountability.

Figure 7-1 depicts the most likely successful matches between your particular personality and job candidates on the dimensions of motivation, work setting and culture preference, and career stage with which we started this chapter.

Too many ventures fail not because they have bad products, lousy business models, too little money, or uninterested customers, but because they don’t get the team dynamics and work culture right. As a builder, you may do a great job of selling and telling to get your businesses off the ground, but then flunk at gelling—developing an effective, high-performing team of talented people to grow that business to the scale worthy of its potential. Armed with the insights in this chapter, you can improve your odds of achieving what may be the most important fit of all: that between your Builder Personality and the team members you choose—and who, in turn, choose you—to build this business.