Venture capitalists meticulously vet CEOs and technologies but overlook the critical need for management training in early-stage startups, leading to company cultures that can be difficult and costly to fix as the organization grows.
I get this call at least once a month. “We’re a three-year-old startup in (some fancy technology) and we have hired most of our people right out of academia. We’re now about 30 people and are still a pretty flat organization. but we do have teams working on our technology. The problem is our team leaders have no management experience. And the people they’re leading have no industry experience. So, they’re all behaving like they’re still in a university lab, each one wanting their own project, expecting bonuses and promotions just for showing up at work and wanting a voice in corporate strategic decisions. Can you help us?”
They didn’t notice that these things were starting to happen way back in years one and two – kind of like the frog in the hot water phenomenon. They don’t notice it’s getting hot until it’s too hot. It’s hard to see your company’s culture and people’s expectations and behaviors getting formed in real time. By the time you do, you’re cooked. The time to adjust the temperature is long before it starts getting hot.
Here are two mistakes these companies made along the way.
1. The first people they hired had deep expertise in the technology, but none in management. If they came straight out of academia their opportunities for gaining such skills were limited or non-existent. Companies think they got lucky because they hired someone who actually ran their own lab in academia. Don’t bank on it. Except for whatever on the job training academics get (meaning, “Here’s your research grant, go hire some people and do some experiments”) they mostly have no training in management. To compound the problem, there’s no oversight of how they do manage, except in cases of malfeasance.
2. Not recognizing this absence of managerial expertise these new hires were turned loose to recruit and manage more staff, with predictable results.
Why did the brilliant people who funded these companies (typically venture capital groups – VCs) allow them to do this with their money? The VCs spent months vetting the CEO and the technology, examining the market for its potential products and oohing and aahing over the luminaries on the scientific advisory board. Why wouldn’t they have spent ten minutes asking how the company will ensure that their staff will be overseen by people with demonstrated managerial skills? The answer is that they suspect there’s no way the typical company could ensure that, so why bother asking. And of course they’re wrong.
The time to train your scientists as managers is not when things start getting out of hand, but now – when you’re growing. If your organization grows from a dysfunctional foundation, it may be hard or costly to fix it later It’s now that your company’s culture and practices are being created and baked in. And it’s this culture and these practices that get transmitted to new employees. The benefit of training? Managers who know how to give feedback that helps lagging employees improve, meetings that don’t run forever and don’t end in arguments, and staff who have learned how to negotiate differences of opinion in a collegial manner. Will these things guarantee you’ll succeed? Of course not. But while good management skills can’t turn bad science into good science, poor management skills can and do kill good science. That’s when they Google “Management skills for scientists.”
Carl M. Cohen, Ph.D.
President, Science Management Associates
www.sciencema.com