Building in safeguards
When I was first building Bright I was terrified of giving up control. I didn’t know what a board or cofounders would make me do and I had so many stories of it going really downhill.
What I didn’t realize is that unless you are perfectly self aware and have no emotional reactions, accountability from the right people can be life saving. I made a lot of mistakes in the early days because I let my emotions run me.
When meeting with cofounders, your board, or an exec team, I think you should look to the combination of when you feel emotional AND when the team pushes back. This may be the sign of you making an emotional vs logical decision. And then you should discuss what may be leading to this emotional decision so that all can understand and you can disarm the emotion in order to make the decision logically.
But emotions have no place in a board meeting you say! Some history here may help us to understand this statement. Rewind to the 1800s, the industrial era in the US and work consistent of repetitive actions on a factory line or in the field. You had to dig holes over and over again and great workers were those with the greatest throughput of these tasks, of which emotions could slow you down or distract you. Fast forward to today - much of work involves making the right decision and a lot of repetitive work is or is in the process of being outsourced to some form of robots. To make great decisions, you need various perspectives, and to get perspectives, you need listen and work well with others on a detailed and nuanced level. For instance, how can you decide whether or not to make an acquisition without the perspectives of very thoughtful and relevant people, and how can you work with them without understanding what egos, insecurities, and similar may be behind your preferences and theirs as well.
You can take this too far. Work should not be therapy - it’s not where you uncover your childhood trauma. But it can be the place that connects you and even pays for therapy or other resources that can help. Helping to identify how you improve and where the support can come from is squarely in the realm of what a great company can do. We are emotional beings and as we advance in our career the impact emotions have only increases, so so should our ability to address them.
Good luck!