We asked 120 start-up founders what leadership qualities were essential – unsurprisingly the results were surprising
The thing about start-up founders is…
The thing about start-up founders is there is no single thing you can say about start-up founders.
What’s true for one is typically not true for another: by their nature founders are mavericks, occasionally eccentric and always single-minded followers of a vision.
So, we weren’t surprised when we got 120 of them to sit down, as part of our Sofa Series, and tell us what three qualities they associated with successful founders that many didn’t play ball.
Some gave just one quality, some provided only two, a few stuck to the remit and supplied three while others sailed nonchalantly passed the prescribed limit.
But these things have a habit of balancing themselves out.
From the 120 results we ended up with 368 answers which is, as close as damn it, bang on what we were expecting.
What we weren’t expecting, however, was the unity of the responses.
What did our founders answer?
There were three absolutely clear winning qualities and just 14 mentioned in total.
A truly unexpected unanimity.
Let’s share our results with no further ado – we’d hate to leave you waiting.
As you can see there were three runaway winners, followed by five popular qualities and six other also-rans.
The runaway three
- Nearly half of all our founders mentioned focus or resilience as an essential quality
- 44% spoke of passion and belief
- And 38% opted for the ability to delegate or its corollary the knack of building an effective team around themselves
Before looking at the second tranche, let’s allow the founders to speak for themselves about why they consistently picked the top three qualities.
Many founders mentioned every one of the three without barely pausing for a breath.
Determination is the single most important quality an entrepreneur can have. You’ll win, you’ll lose, you’ll get knocked down. But you’ll always maintain that stubborn belief, persevere and find a way.
The ability to attract, develop and lead a team. The ability to attract and hire great people, is the cornerstone of any successful founder or business. Having a team that you can empower to support you and enable growth and scale is essential.
Every successful founder has a clear vision of where they are going and what they are trying to achieve. Without this clarity you can’t focus your efforts, your determination or your team.
Neil Purcell
Successful entrepreneurs have a vision of how they believe they can impact other people’s lives. They are brave enough to start pursuing that vision irrelevant of the odds of success or lack of support received. They persevere until they accomplish the task.
They take care of people around them. No matter how successful, you’ll never be fulfilled on your own.
Minday Plauska
Here are some other examples where the themes of focus/resilience, passion/belief and delegation/team building weave their way persistently through the responses.
Focus and persistence
Adam Edgell-Bush
Alastair Bell
Alessandra Schmidt
Angel Maldonado
Carlos Doughty
Irina Vasile
Passion and belief
Pavan Riyat-Ward
Stephen Gorman
Alan Waxman
James Briscoe
Susan Hallam
Delegate and build your team
Matthew Pavli
Pavan Riyat-Ward
Gary Hunter
Stephen Gorman
Steve Bax
Other dominant themes
Each representing between a fifth and a quarter of all responses, these qualities also came up:
- Creative thinking/adaptability (25%)
- Trusting and listen skills (23%)
- Transparency, accountability and honesty (21%)
- Inspirational and motivational communicator (18%)
- Financial, customer and business awareness (18%)
It’s interesting that having a dream is significantly more important than having defined business skills – and it’s also interesting that the emphasis on focus appears to clash with the desired adaptability.
Let’s pick up on the last point here, as it is often directly addressed by the founders themselves as you can see in Andrew Edgell-Bush’s three founder traits:
Grit – the start-up journey is normally longer than most people imagine and likely more perilous. You will be knocked down more times than you think and it takes grit to keep on getting back up.
Strong opinions, weakly held – indecision costs both money and time, but you often lack data to inform your direction of travel. How to balance this? Be committed, but validate along the way.
Humility – if you are never wrong, you are not experimenting enough. Accept that the market and others will know more than you.
Adam Edgell-Bush
You’ll see similar formulations of this in the following quotes.
Mike Utting
Lucy James
Jordan Schlipf
James Chapman
Jack De Glanville
Bridgette Cameron
Last but not least
The final tranche of qualities that made the list were mentioned 70 to 85% less than the chart topper. Yet each still was mentioned by between a tenth and a fifth of all the founders we consulted.
They were:
- Self-development (16%)
- Compassion/Understanding (14%)
- Level-headed/balance (13%)
- Practical skills (12%)
- Quick decision making (8%)
- Consistency/fairness (8%)
As part of balance many referred to work/life balance – in stark contrast to other founders who swore blind that a 100% work ethic and nothing less would help.
Andrew Fennell
Louis Georgiou
Practical skills also tended to refer to the idea of pitching in and being part of the team.
For instance:
Michael Donald
And finally…
As we said we were surprised at the unanimity of the responses from such a diverse bunch.
Here’s a few other things to bear in mind.
- Nearly 50% of founders see focus and persistence as one of three (or four, or five, or two) vital leadership qualities
- Being consistent was mentioned 85% less than focus
- Adaptability tempers focus with nearly a third mentioning the former
- The top three are miles ahead of other qualities. In fact, there is a 53% difference between the fourth most-mentioned quality (adaptability) and the bottom of the top three (delegation and team building)
And there’s plenty more gems to share from our Sofa Series to come.