How Leadership Dynamics Shape Small Teams in Startups
Summary:
Dr. Jim talks with Cleary CEO Thomas Kunjappu about leadership myths in HR. They discuss the importance of leadership in startups and personal branding for talent recruitment.
Thomas shares his transition from Twitter to his tech startup Cleary, highlighting personal brand importance in recruiting and vision communication. They debunk the myth that startups need leadership skills less, with Thomas stressing their importance in small teams and how reflection and iteration lead to business success.
Key Takeaways:
* Leadership dynamics significantly affect a small team's effectiveness and the speed of an organization's advancement.
* When moving from a large company to a startup, having a strong personal brand and network is crucial.
* Regularly evaluating results is essential to improve leadership tactics and approaches.
* Hiring for a startup means presenting an attractive vision and displaying convincing leadership to persuade people to take on the risk.
Chapters:
00:00:00 Introduction to the conversation with Thomas Kunjappu, CEO of Cleary
00:01:03 Thomas shares his background and the founding of Cleary
00:02:02 Lessons learned from transitioning from Twitter to a startup
00:03:11 Overcoming the lack of an established brand as a startup
00:04:17 Dr. Jim asks Thomas about the HR myth he wants to bust
00:05:05 The importance of leadership skills in a startup environment
00:06:37 Impact of focusing on leadership competencies on team velocity
00:07:24 How progress and results indicate success in leadership
00:07:45 Closing remarks and contact information for Thomas Kunjappu
Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk
Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung
Connect with Thomas Kunjappu: linkedin.com/in/thomaskunjappu
Music Credit: Shake it Up - Fesliyanstudios.com - David Renda
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Transcript
Welcome. Thanks for hanging out.
[:[:
[00:00:31] Thomas Kunjappu: Yes, absolutely. I'm the founder, CEO of Cleary, and I'm an Indian American immigrant. Been here for many decades, grew up in New York, but moved out to the Bay area. A while back.
[:[00:00:42] Thomas Kunjappu: Shout out to Kerala. There we go, Jim. I moved out to the Bay Area chasing that dream go West, young man, they said.
was eventually what drew me [:Think of it as a modern intranet. And it's really based off of a lot of my experiences building such tools internally at Twitter, where we built up this really cool set of tools that Tweeps we're using every single day, and it's led us on this journey where we're partnering with people, leaders, Internal communications leaders, I.
T. leaders, as we figure out the future of work, which has been zigging and zagging, as with. Remote work and hybrid work, as well as this era of efficiency that we're now in, in 23 24, which is one of the themes that we're hearing in the conference here, where people leaders are asked to do more with less.
So we're there in the mix. And I love working with people. Leaders are trying to figure out what the. A great future organization would look like, cause it's going to look very different in a few
years than it does now.
[:Spending a lot of time in a resource rich environment like Twitter and then coming to a scrappy startup What was the biggest lesson learned [00:02:00] in making that pivot that you didn't expect
[:Does it, to some degree, you're like the moon reflecting some of the light that's coming in from the existing brand value and content to be successful. And you need to create that context. So some of the biggest surprises there was just like learning processes, for example, go to market motion, how to do sales, how to work with people who don't know you, because, You're don't have the context that you're working at the same company.
For example, there's a lot of skill sets where the halo effect of the brand gets you much farther ahead. While that's something you need to build on your own when you're building out a new company.
[:So when you think, when you switch gears and look [00:03:00] at, okay, how do you overcome that as a scrappy startup? How did you do that? You don't have the brand of Twitter to rely on. So you're a virtual unknown when you're starting up. You're really unknown when you're starting up. So what were the levers that you pulled to still get the talent that you wanted and still present a compelling vision that attracts people to the organization?
[:Now that includes like outreach and how I connect with new people about the vision that we had because it was grounded in some realities, of some experiences that that we had from previous roles, which helps build more trust, but also you're leveraging your own network as much as you can to create some goodwill that you've built over your career, but in some degree you're cashing that all in, because [00:04:00] you're. Going off to do this whole thing. And you're in this world of being very humble and asking for favors while you get to the point of creating proof which then creates a snowball effect and your own brand and your own, idea of what this new company is in the market.
[:[00:04:17] Thomas Kunjappu: Sure. Let's do it.
[:[00:04:26] Thomas Kunjappu: It's interesting. I can speak to this from the perspective of an entrepreneur.
So I've worked at big companies and led broader, bigger teams. I've been part of like management trainings and with leadership trainings. And as I was going off to start Cleary I thought that all of that about leadership and management, all of that would be pretty useless in the context of a startup, because we're needing to do that.
ou're going to do everything [:Because when you're working in a small team and you have accountability at this whole other level than you do at a larger company setting, that is difficult to pull off without the ability to lead yourself, being accountable to yourself. And then even when you have a team of two, literally, leadership dynamics come into frame.
Little micro decisions, like when would you meet? How do you hold each other accountable? What's the next step we're going to do there? Who would make what decision it even comes to be when you have just even two people, but then even broader than that, when you're going out to market and you're talking to, potential customers or customers, what you're really doing there is leading them to a vision, which is what you're trying to birth out of nothing.
the definition of creating a [:And even just recruiting one person to come join you on that journey, where they're taking a significant part of their life to, to work with you on this vision. It's a pretty distinct, because if you think about it, it's a risky move versus working at a company where they already know many other people are coming.
So it was a significant part of the skill set to be successful even in the early days.
[:[00:06:53] Thomas Kunjappu: The moment of reflection is when you see that particular outcomes aren't working out well. Like we're not meeting deadlines, we're [00:07:00] not closing customers, or we're not able to actually recruit talent the way that we want to. So it comes from this period of reflection. And each of those kind of, each of those takes a different kind of activity to, to get there, but then it's measured in just progress and results,.
We had an iterative approach to all of these things, but then we knew we were on the right track because We are getting closer to those results faster. So it's like speed of velocities and outcomes. I
would say
[:But that's not the format of this show. So if people want to continue the conversation, what's the best way for them to get in touch with
you?
[:[00:07:44] Dr. Jim: Thanks for hanging out and busting some myths with us. Stay tuned for more conversations where we're going to be busting more HR and leadership myths at HR transform 2024,
