Companies are living things. They experience birth, triumphs, failure and everything in between.
As the entrepreneur, one of your jobs is to feel for the company. If the company is threatened, then you feel fear. If the company is victorious, then you feel elated. If the company fails, you feel frustration.
This relationship with your company is important - in fact it is critical to your company's success! These feelings will help you drive the company forward. Your company's hunger for money will drive you to find money. Your company's fear will drive you to take action.
You should be careful to understand the differences between "company feelings" and "personal feelings". If your company is running of money; you might feel anxious. By associating your anxiety with the company, you will be motivated to raise more money or sell more products.
If you take personal actions to alleviate company fears, you will damage your company. For example, taking a consulting job may be comforting - but this won't do your company any good. You may justify this action as "a way to keep the company going", or "working on your plan b" - but you would be wrong. As soon as you stop feeling for your company, your company is dead. It won't take long.
When you are all alone in your startup, feelings can be hard to manage. But, they become even harder to manage when the company gets big.
Over time, you will find people to join your company. When you are lucky, you will find other founders. These people will stand out because they share your passion for the company. They will look for a piece of the company that they can adopt and be responsible for. These people are not just employees. They aren't there simply to do a job. They are there because they believe in the company and they want to see it succeed.
Founders will have a natural tendency to experience the same feelings that you do. However, there is a big difference between you and the other founders. While you can influence everything that goes on in the company, the other founders (unless they are on the board) can not. This can lead to problems.
Sometimes a well-meaning founder can find himself/herself distracted by feelings that are outside of his/her control. As a result, you will notice developers complaining about people in marketing, QA people complaining about developers, marketing people complaining about engineering, and so on.
As the entrepreneur, you need to be the clearing house for complaints. People need to feel comfortable sharing their feelings with you. This will help minimize infighting and keep people on-task. Also, you should talk regularly about responsibility and authority. If Larry is responsible for QA, he needs to have the authority to make changes in QA. Similarly, if Larry does not have the authority to change a marketing program, then he should not feel responsible for it. This sounds like a simple concept, but I am AMAZED by the number of times that someone feels responsible for something that is quite clearly out of their control.
You should also recognize that these feelings can be overwhelming for certain individuals on your staff. Sometimes you need to reassure people, even if you don not necessarily feel all that secure yourself.
Finally, you may find it necessary to compartmentalize information - you may want to act as a buffer between things going on in the board, for example, and the people who are responsible for the day to day activities in the company. Don't view this as a bad thing. Don't think you are being sneaky. In fact, you can be up front about the compartmentalization and tell people that you are acting as a buffer. Explain why you are doing it.
You don't want to do too much compartmentalization though - otherwise you will become a stressed out micro-manager. Seek an appropriate, delicate balance.
By managing your company's feelings and expectations your company will live a long healthy life!
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