Leadership and Vision in Venture Building: Keys to Building Success

A typical startup workspace has cultural conflicts, decision-making problems, and employees resisting frequent changes. Leaders with a clear vision and strong management abilities are saviours in such situations.

Not having a clear vision for a business is like solving a jigsaw without knowing the image on the box. Vision relays the core principles of an organisation. It helps in talent acquisition, determining the business environment and its culture, and maintaining sustainable growth.

This blog by GrowthJockey discusses the importance of vision and leadership in business and how it drives startup success.

Top 6 Qualities of Effective Leaders

The types of leadership in business environments are different, but some core qualities set effective leaders apart. Let us discuss some of these qualities.

1. Analytical Prowess

Leaders identify issues, observe patterns, create solutions, and implement them in the business environment. They don’t just rely on their gut feeling for doing such crucial tasks every day.

Rather, they train themselves on cause-and-effect relationships and skilfully observe trends leading to success or failure.

2. Adaptability

Business arenas are continuously changing due to evolving technology and artificial intelligence. Stakeholders’ expectations from businesses are also changing with that. Therefore, business leaders must be agile enough to adjust to these shifts in demand.

However, adaptability involves more than just reacting to changes; it requires anticipating future trends and preparing for them. This forward-thinking approach allows leaders to navigate uncertainties with confidence and resilience.

3. Resilience

Although leaders are expected to be flawless, that is not reality. You are bound to veer off track sometimes.

A resilient leader is a person who can identify and accept failures and recalibrate their course towards needed rectification or solution.

One can hone this skill by regularly assessing their leadership in startups. They must exercise flexibility but not steer away from their primary objectives.

4. Managing Ambiguity

Leaders, when building a business, are thrown into situations that have multiple causes or directions to them. Therefore, they must balance conflicting thoughts and manage competing priorities simultaneously.

Leaders must have the most logical responses to uncertain situations. You can achieve the skill by exercising different perspectives on a single situation.

5. Ability to Take Risks to be Innovative

Experimenting makes way for innovation in building business. However, it comes with the possibility of being unsuccessful at it.

Great leaders acknowledge this and promote experiments and innovation within teams. They should also create a more accepting environment even if the innovations do not turn out helpful.

6. Has Great Influence

The word leader is all about impacting people’s thoughts, their belief systems, and their decisions. Start practicing the skill early on in your career. Make yourself visible, have opinions on events and situations, and voice them out.

Another characteristic of an influential person is the ability to build consensus in group discussions.

Over time these skills and experiences make it easier to determine the company's business directions. Leaders can then unify the entire team towards a shared vision by creating visuals of the end goal.

Creating and Communicating a Vision in Startups

Vision is the image of how everything about your company is going to be after a given number of years.

It should be clear not just to you but to every employee you work with. This is essential for everybody to work in the same direction, seeking the same outcomes.

However, developing and communicating a vision is a complicated process. It requires clarity, creativity, and conviction. Here are some of the ways to do it.

1. Define the Vision

The leader must clarify the vision and eliminate any confusion about it. Use the SMART technique to define your vision. Here are some questions to use when deciding on a brand’s purpose.

• What is the startup’s goal?
• Why is it important now and in the future?
• How will it impact our employees, customers, and stakeholders?
• What are our key principles and values?
• How will I know if I have achieved the vision?

2. Test the Vision

You can’t have an idea or a vision and sit on it through your business development journey. Once you decide on a purpose, you need to test it with your team and other stakeholders. It helps realign and refine the vision.

Use these questions to rethink your ideas.

• Do all the stakeholders resonate with the vision?
• Does it act on their expectations and needs?
• Is the vision aligning with organisational culture?
• Does the vision make us stand out from our competitors?

GrowthJockey can help you evaluate the vision by conducting an audit and survey of relevant market data.

3. Communicate the Vision

As a leader, you cannot just pass on the vision anyhow. You are responsible for conveying the vision in a way that people understand, relate to, and adopt into their performances.

There are various mediums to communicate the vision to stakeholders, like presentations, newsletters, video conferences, and meetings. Try asking these questions to make the process easier for yourself.

• How can I make the communication simple, clear, and impactful?
• How can I showcase the relevance of this vision to stakeholders?
• How can I appeal to their values and emotions?
• How can I drive them to take action on it?

Case Studies of Visionary Leaders

Let us discuss some of the extraordinary Indian startup leaders who have been successful at building businesses from scratch.

1. Vikas Sharma

Vikas heads Myperfectpack, an online printing service under Ekkenis Software Service Limited. His leadership style is dominated by a problem-solving approach.

MyPerfectPack was born out of the frustration of minimum order quantity (MOQ) in the printing industry. They also resolved the persisting creative limitations and print quality issues.

Thus, Myperfectpack became a one-stop printing solution for small startups to big industries.

He has expanded his services to various startups both in India and abroad, like Tea and Twigs, BADAAS in the US, and BARFIBITE in the UK.

Vikas has a vision of globally expanding their services to more locations. He believes in inclusivity, which can be observed in his all-woman workforce.

MyPerfectPack was the first Indian company listed on the BSE platform in record time. Under Vikas’s guidance, the company promises quality, sustainability, and innovation.

2. Nithin Kamath

Nithin is an Indian entrepreneur known for his trading platform Zerodha. He has a resilient and determined leadership approach, which helped him establish the company coming from a humble background.

His empathetic abilities are reflected in his responsibilities and efforts to the Rainmatter Foundation. He started the nonprofit organisation to give back to the community by helping ground-level organisations.

These small firms worked to prevent climate change. His passion for the capital market and his desire to help Indian traders have led to Zerodha’s success.

Strategies for Inspiring and Guiding a Team

Leaders follow various strategies to guide, inspire, and motivate their teams and lead them to deliver the best for the brand. It could be nearly impossible to have a long-term goal without a vision, the right knowledge, and feedback.

The strategies to lead your team are:

1. Define and Reiterate Your Vision

Understand the bigger picture, identify the pain points, and develop a solution as your purpose. Now, convey the purpose to the stakeholders. Make it appealing to them by using resources like reports, infographics, and storytelling.

If your team is convinced of the vision, every individual will be working towards the same goal.

2. Recognise and Acknowledge Achievements

This step relies on the principle of ‘what gets rewarded gets repeated.’. Acknowledge and celebrate every time people go above and beyond to get things done.

This boosts employee morale and drives motivation to perform better.

3. Foster Clear Communications

Clear communication among the leaders and the employees increases productivity by 20-25%. Leaders must be communicative and drive the same culture in the workforce. This unhindered exchange of ideas leads to great collaborations and innovations.

4. Practice What You Preach

If you want your team to conduct themselves in a certain way, embody that in yourself. For example, if you want your team to work in an open-door environment, you have to do it too.

Do not stick to your place; walk up to people randomly and discuss ideas or feedback. Employees look up to the leaders to guide them into what is needed.

5. Manage Conflicts

Do not ignore when an employee complains about something you feel is not important. Listen actively and share your views. Try to suggest different perspectives if you can’t directly engage in the situation.

A team will inevitably have conflicts, but leaders can find ways to sustain team harmony.

Summing up

You cannot navigate a vehicle to the destination without a route map. A vision serves as the route map to your business. You, as a leader, have the role of captain of the vehicle.

Your employees will go nowhere with the ideas if they do not have a streamlined vision and guidelines from leaders.

There are a lot of aspects a leader must take care of when building a business, creating a team, and leading it towards future goals.

If not completely, GrowthJockey can take care of some of the responsibilities of a leader. These could be performance analyses of your team and support you in managing your remote business environment, if any.

Book a consultation with GrowthJockey venture builder to learn more about how we help leaders to create a performance-driven team.

FAQs Related to Leadership and Vision in Venture Building

1. What challenges do startup leaders face when guiding a team?

You will come across some obvious challenges when leading a team. These are:

• Feeling reluctant to convey a task to the team as it would be difficult to make them understand.

• You will find yourself ignoring a problem to avoid conflicts in the workplace.

• Losing confidence or feeling demotivated when your decisions don’t turn out well.

Such traits could be harmful to your team. It would help if you learnt to manage such challenges as you started leading a team.

2. What are the best ways to reward my team members for their success?

Try out some of these ideas to reward your team’s hard work.

• Create some form of award within the organisation or the department.

• Send them digital gift cards.

• Treat your team for achievements.

• Celebrate milestones like work anniversaries.

• Sponsor tickets for some events together with the team.

3. What are some resources to develop my leadership skills?

There are many resources to brush up on your leadership skills.

• Books like ‘Visible’s 7 Leadership Communication Principles of Successful Startups’ and ‘Radical Candour by Kim Scott.’

• Online leadership programs offered by various institutions

• Taking up assessments for self-analysis like ‘The predictive index assessment’.