Take Control Over Your Founder Traits: A Mental Model for Success
A 3-steps process to take control over your behaviour and decisions as a founder.
👋 Hey there, I’m Illai. Every day, I share with readers questions, insights and learnings about startups, venture capital, Artificial Intelligence and entrepreneurship. You can find more about what I do and write about here: Illai’s Linkedin | My Website | Fundraising with AI Workshops | ZIZO Product Course | Between App
Paid Subscribers get exclusive access to more articles and insights, get an invite to my community and will get discounts for my online courses, workshops and advisory sessions.
You can hire or fire any of your founder traits at any time.
Every founder is unique and have a combination of characteristics and traits that make them successful and sometimes fail.
I believe that founders can control every situation and the traits they use to manage it with this mental model.
Sometimes we like to think of a founder personality as innate qualities, that one cannot control - the reality is that founders traits are in your control to design as a system.
There is a 3-step process to control and manage your founder character and traits better in each situation:
1) Be aware of your founder traits
Founders need to have the willingness to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Which traits are the most powerful in your founder persona. Many founders don't want to confront the reality, and that in my view show high levels of ego and lack of self-awareness. The ones that do, have the options to map it with different methodologies and practical tests. EQT have worked on The Founder Six with a test you can evaluate your traits, another one is Founder Personalities by Dream VC.
2) Design your 'Organizational Trait Chart'
My mental model states that in each situation you face as a leader, entrepreneurs and founder you lead a team of characteristics in your head. You need to understand the current default situation and how you tend to operate. Which characteristic leads the situation? is it your 'Chief Ego Officer'? your ‘Chief Ambition Officer'? then who else on the trait team is involved.
3) Hire and fire traits from your Trait Organization
By building this mental model, you can decide consciously, who do you wish to hire and fire from that organization. You might want to fire the 'Chief Fear Officer' or the 'Chief Ego Officer'. In some situations, you want the 'Chief Resilience Officer' to lead the situation and in other cases you want it to be a second layer in commend.
The best recommendation I can give to founders adopting my mental model of 'Organizational Trait Chart' is to take a pen and paper and sketch it when you pause to reflect and control each situation - make your decisions with the right trait team you build for yourself.
Visualizing the situation allows you to make personal decisions and act upon them.
If you lead a team, this approach can help you with leading with empathy and understand your people better, by thinking about which trait system is leading their action in their decisions and behaviour.
What’s New?
I have a new Lightning Session on Maven! Join me on a Free Webinar on How To Use AI to Raise Capital for Your Startup
