Entrepreneurs often develop strong feelings about the connection of friendship to business success—feelings that can get in the way when they enter a corporate setting.
Consider an entrepreneur—let’s call him Mike—who sold his company to a big corporation and agreed to stay on as the head of the small division created from his startup. He had brought his head of marketing with him and considered him a fast friend. After all, the two of them had spent several years in the trenches together building the startup into a vibrant enterprise and three years doing the same thing in their rapidly growing new division. But when a corporate reorganization came along and the marketing head was moved to corporate, Mike mistakenly regarded the challenges that ensued as a test of their friendship rather than as a test of his leadership.
The parent company wanted a more unified brand, so they decided to have the marketing and branding groups of each of the divisions report directly to a corporate group. Problems soon followed. Mike had been given prior notice of the reorganization, but he had not been allowed to share the news or prepare his team for the announcement. His recommendations for how to lower the risks of the transition had been rejected and the needs of the larger divisions dominated the reorganization planning.
A few of Mike’s best people resigned. Important new product launches fell behind schedule. An astute competitor launched a campaign targeting the small division’s customers, and the newly enlarged corporate group could not decide how to respond for several weeks. More people were preparing to leave. Worst of all, Mike felt betrayed by his former head of marketing. He thought he could count on his friend to keep corporate’s attention on the needs of the small division.
But the friend had his own challenges—and different responsibilities—in his new corporate role. He hadn’t betrayed Mike; he was only trying to do what was best for the company, not simply one of its divisions.
The breakthrough for Mike came when an executive coach he knew helped him realized that he needed to disentangle the confusing threads of entrepreneurship, friendship, and leadership that inevitably become intertwined in the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes harrowing, experience of starting a business. Each of those threads has its unique demands. By sorting them out, Mike was able to put aside unreasonable expectations about friendship and seize the mantle of leadership. To lead his division through the new corporate terrain, he decided to do the following:
Make priorities clear. His greatest fear was that his priorities would no longer be the priorities of the people marketing and branding his products—which led him to realize he did not know what their priorities really were. He needed a mutual priority-setting process with corporate. One thing he had learned as an entrepreneur were the principles of effective priority setting. For example, he was well aware that forced-ranking systems don’t work. Such systems become particularly unstable when two different groups try to figure out how much effort to invest in a priority that ranks number one on a small division’s list but only eighth on corporate’s list. Instead, he persuaded corporate to harmonize priorities by agreeing which were critical, which important, and which merely desirable and then assign specific resources for specific time periods to each accordingly.
Formulate priorities so they clearly support corporate objectives. For a startup guy, Mike had a decent amount of empathy for people who had climbed the corporate ladder. He soon realized that his job was to directly relate his division’s priorities to corporate objectives. The magnitude of the corporate marketing and branding resources the division would receive directly depended upon making those connections clear and acting on them.
Develop a more powerful relationship with the CMO. For the previous three years Mike had not invested any effort in developing a closer relationship with anyone at corporate other than the CEO, whom he had come to respect in the course of negotiations to acquire Mike’s startup. He hadn’t needed much help or support from the CMO. He now realized that failing to establish a relationship had been a mistake. But by making it clear that he would align his priorities with those of corporate marketing (and by learning what the CMO wanted to accomplish personally), he gained far more helpful corporate attention for his division than he would have if he had continued to expect his friendship with his former head of marketing to get the job done.
Keep the marketing and branding team assigned to his division close and feeling successful. While cultivating the support of the CMO, he also paid close attention to everyone else in corporate marketing and branding working on his projects, letting them know he supported their efforts and wanted each of them succeed.
Make time to make the plan work.Mike was confident he could implement his plan, but he realized that his biggest challenge would be in freeing up the time to do it. He would need to delegate more of his work and responsibilities in other areas. So he promoted a highly talented direct report—who had been thinking about leaving—to the position of divisional COO.
This was all psychologically harder than it looks. Mike might easily have let his feeling of being betrayed by his former head of marketing contaminate his entire relationship with corporate. But by distinguishing between the demands of friendship and the demands of leadership, he not only survived and thrived after the reorganization. He was also able to remain friends with his comrade in arms from their heady days building a company together.
