Q: How Can I Get Founders to Listen to My Suggestions?

A question from a frustrated early employee in a startup: how can I get founders to listen to my ideas and suggestions?

Q: How Do Early Employees Get Founders to Listen?

Q: I am in my second full-time job; it’s my first time in a startup. I spent two years at a software firm with three hundred employees and absorbed insights into developing and shipping features. The startup has only a dozen people, and it moves faster but is much more disorganized. I have been involved in interview rounds for new employees that were poorly managed. That was frustrating, but what has been more frustrating is that no one seemed to see the problems. As a result, they were not open to my suggestions.

A: A startup with a dozen people is starting to gain some structure but can still be a wild ride, especially if there are not many experienced employees. The decision of who to hire is a critical one in a startup, as is the need to assess a potential candidate’s capabilities and fit with the team. It’s also the case that interviews are an opportunity to encourage qualified candidates to feel welcome and wanted.

It’s entirely possible that you had some good suggestions and should have been listened to but it’s also possible you don’t understand all of the constraints on what’s possible. While initiative and frank talk are expected, if not required, of early employees in a startup, most change is incremental and the result of patient persuasion and appeals based on organizational survival or robustness.

Since you are newly hired and have only two years of work experience, you probably have less work experience than many others on the team. I suggest a more indirect approach. Who, outside of the founders, has the most experience with managing an interview process? Can you talk to them one-on-one and get feedback on your suggestions? Ask how the process was defined and whether they see the same problems today that you do. This approach is likely to work for other areas as well. At a dozen people, the organization is in transition from a flat structure to one or more levels of hierarchy; it’s important to recognize who may be responsible for an issue or decision besides the founders and approach them first.

Different people absorb information in different ways. Some on the team may prefer numbers related to time savings or financial impact. Others may prefer stories or case studies, either in writing or in a conversation. Presenting to a group can be hard, so it helps to write down your suggestion, rehearse it, and have one-on-one conversations first with people who may be more willing to give you feedback or ways to improve your presentation.

In “On Being a Teacher,” Jonathan Kozol offers a perspective on managing learning challenges I have found valuable:

“Struggles that we and our students hope to undertake ought to be measured by their value, on the one hand, and real chances for completion on the other: Battles large enough to matter, small enough to win.”
Jonathan Kozol in “On Being a Teacher”

This often gets condensed into “Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win,” but I find his original compelling since it is clearly focused on learning.

My assumption is that you don’t feel you are being asked to compromise your values. If you do feel that, then it’s probably better to look for work at a company you believe is more aligned with your values.

SideBar: Some Traits to Develop for Success as an Early Employee

In “Working Capital: Assembling Your Team,” I suggested these key traits founders should look for in the first dozen employees:

• Experts in at least one area relevant to your business with a bias toward action: they can roll up their sleeves and get things done.
• Flexible contributors who can tolerate the irreducible uncertainties and ambiguities in a startup. They understand E. L. Doctorow’s insight that “Driving a car at night, you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
• Constructive collaborators who communicate clearly, appreciate other points of view, spot defects in a plan or design, and suggest fixes.
• People who are willing to experiment and learn from the results, to manage multiple hypotheses and to look for complex causes and outcomes, balancing exploration and refinement to avoid premature optimization.
• People with a demonstrated commitment to continued self-improvement.
• People with a track record of taking the initiative to provide value to customers. Someone who bent the rules to do the right thing, or gave the customer the benefit of the doubt, or worked overtime when the customer situation called for it.

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