5
THE CAPTAIN 
Pragmatic, Team-Enabling, and Direct
They were all surgeons, but I wanted to build a team.
—Margery Kraus, Captain, APCO Worldwide
Margery Kraus was a thirty-eight-year-old mother of three young children when a partner at Arnold & Porter, a well-known Washington, DC, law firm, happened to see her running a call-in program on C-SPAN. He and some of his partners asked her to take over a nascent consulting practice to serve the expanding needs of their clients.
While she immediately saw the opportunity with this role, she also could see its challenges: a team with an ill-defined mission somewhere between advocacy-like lobbying and public relations, composed of a handful of non-legal professionals, within a law firm where formal legal training was the currency of the realm. Kraus describes her first impressions: “It wasn’t like I had this great design or vision. I saw an opportunity, and I saw people struggling to get it done. I felt I knew what to do. I just see things and think, if you connect the dots and drive it, it will happen.”1
The Captain Profile
| Factor | Description |
|---|---|
| MOTIVATION |
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| DECISION-MAKING MODE |
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| MANAGEMENT APPROACH |
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| LEADERSHIP STYLE |
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Like Kraus, Captains often build ventures that either started out as someone else’s brainchild or coalesced the elements of customer need, talented people, and timing into a business. As she explains, “There were clearly lobbyists, PR people, and grassroots campaign organizers, but nobody was a general practitioner. They were all surgeons. I wanted to build a team that first listened to our clients to help them diagnose their problem. It seemed just like common sense to me.”
She credits much of her global success to her early experience as a teacher—a role many Captains play in building their businesses: “If you’re doing business outside the US and get in trouble, it’s usually because you don’t understand how the system works. So being a civics teacher is actually pretty helpful.”
APCO Worldwide, which Kraus spun out of the law firm many years ago, now has offices in sixty countries around the world, serving heads of state and global CEOs. It has grown to be the second-largest privately held public relations firm in the United States.
Kraus’s founding story of APCO is vintage Captain. Serendipity helped to create the context, and then Kraus practiced active listening to understand the problem and recruited and galvanized the right team to forge a collaborative culture.
Culture is a very big deal for Captains, as opposed to being an afterthought for some of their builder cousins. They complement their manage-from-behind style with a lead-from-the-front approach to culture. In this way, Captains create a more cohesive team by preserving a sense of collegial, interdependent commitment to the work at hand. Kraus puts it perfectly: “I hired a lot of smart people who thought bigger than what they were doing.”
How Captains Engage:
“Collaboration Beats Dictatorship”
If you’re a Captain, your motivation comes from making something you deem important happen. You relish the building process itself almost as much as the businesses you build. “I’ve never worried about how big this firm is,” Kraus says, “I’ve just worried about how good we are and how different we might be.”
As a Captain, you’re inspired to create an enterprise of value through your three core gifts: strategic vision, values, and empowering others. You are not necessarily anchored around a particular problem (the Explorer), the market opportunity or a product inspiration (the Driver), or an ambitious sense of the market’s deeper needs (the Crusader). Instead, you are drawn to the task of building through your ability to unleash the value-creating power of others.
Captains are pragmatic managers, but not usually with the me-centered or over-controlling style of their Driver and Explorer counterparts. If you are a Captain, you are more like an orchestra conductor, comfortable in yielding the spotlight to soloists or instrumental sections as circumstances dictate, while retaining the baton of leadership and a high level of accountability for results.
Captains prefer a trust-but-verify style of decision making. This approach isn’t because they don’t have a strong point of view, but because they would rather find consensus through a focus on the mission and vision. In meetings, Captains may listen first and speak last, not wanting to compromise the possibility of empowering others to get the job done.
Let’s look at how these elements of motivation, management, leadership, and decision-making style manifest themselves as Captains engage the five dynamics of company growth.
The Solution Dynamic:
Converting Ideas into Products
Captains present a mixed picture in the solution dynamic. Some, like Margery Kraus, fall into an idea spawned by others and start making it their own. Others, like Paul Gilbert, founder of MedAvante, a global innovator in clinical trials for mental health drugs, develop their ideas through a deliberate, often collaborative, process of focused brainstorming and trial and error.
“You need to let the steering wheel turn with the road you’re discovering.”
In 2001, Gilbert gathered eight accomplished friends and colleagues from marketing, technology, and the health-care industry. Each weekend for more than a year, they would brainstorm additions to a list of potential near-term health-care problems, which they believed they could build a company to solve. They finally emerged with a novel way to enhance the accuracy of clinical trials for new psychotropic drugs (think Prozac).
These drugs are very expensive to create. Clinical testing of these new compounds often fails to isolate the therapeutic effect from a placebo (sugar pill). Gilbert, the orchestrator of the venture, assembled a team of experts, created an environment of collaboration, and developed and commercialized a method to solve this seemingly intractable problem.
The story of Gilbert and his cofounder building MedAvante reveals three common tendencies of the Captain: organize a talented team; use a methodical, fact-based approach; and focus on material economic problems that represent a near-term business opportunity. This approach stands in stark contrast to the Driver, who believes he or she can sense where the market is headed and who creates products, services, and solutions often in advance of expressed demand.
Also in contrast with their other three builder counterparts, Captains are quite comfortable with engaging potential customers at a very early stage, even with crude prototypes of their ideas. As Gilbert says, “Entrepreneurship is a discovery process. You come to understand that the initial questions may be different from the right questions. You have to have a starting point—a clear, measurable point of pain and a value proposition that can address it. But the great majority of the time, it is not where you end up. You need to let the steering wheel turn with the road you’re discovering; you cannot lock your steering wheel to a predetermined plan. It’s not a road map.”
In a sense, Captains face all five growth dynamics with a pragmatic, real-time approach, rather than with a predetermined sense of what the outcome should be, as Drivers and Explorers often do. In MedAvante’s case, this search for the best way to demonstrate their idea became a multiyear odyssey to discover, develop, and prove the right solution to the problem they originally identified.
Just like Margery Kraus’s somewhat accidental introduction to APCO, Captains may not start with a specific product or solution in mind, but they are drawn into the search for one that works. John Crowley, who developed a novel approach to clinical trials for a debilitating disease, also followed the idea-to-product path, but for far more personal and urgent reasons, as we will explain below.
“I had no choice. I had to do this . . . now!”
Imagine if your child had a rare and apparently incurable disease. What would you do? What risks might you take to find a treatment or cure for him or her? You’d probably search everywhere for any way to help your child, and you would be willing to spend whatever resources you had in that effort, right?
Now imagine you’re not a doctor or scientist and you have no academic or professional background in that disease. You work for a pharmaceutical company, but you’re a manager and marketer by training. Would you quit your high-paying, successful job and interrupt your career to start a company to find a cure for your child’s disease?
That’s what Crowley did after two of his children were diagnosed with Pompe disease, a fatal neuromuscular disorder in which children live short and excruciatingly painful lives. Crowley and his wife simply couldn’t wait for others to find a cure or treatment. They needed to do something fast. Before his children were born, he had thought that sometime later in his career, he might start a company. “I’m naturally a risk-averse kind of guy,” he says. “But my kids’ condition left me no choice. I had to do this . . . now!”
Crowley learned of a fledgling biotech research company in Oklahoma City called Novazyme Pharmaceuticals, which was investigating a bioengineered replacement for the enzyme that is deficient in people with Pompe disease. He quit his job at Bristol-Myers Squibb and joined the Novazyme team in order to raise the capital, expedite clinical trials to demonstrate the efficacy of this enzyme approach, and get approval for its use. It was, in fact, an effective way to treat Pompe disease, though not a cure. But it was enough to save Crowley’s kids’ lives.
As a Captain, you may enter the solution dynamic with less clarity than other builders might have about the problem, the solution, or the business concept. However, the combination of your pragmatic business sense and your ability to galvanize a team around a question or an opportunity quickly unleashes the solution-generating power of others. With this energy, you can build a company and drive impact.
At the same time, your predilection to allow context and consensus to frame the solution may come at the expense of genuine commercial breakthroughs. Your approach can result in more incremental solutions to more immediate problems. It is less likely to lead to a Steve Jobs–like or Henry Ford–caliber truly disruptive innovation. Other Builder Personality Types probably have a better shot at those kinds of leaps.
The Team Dynamic:
Galvanizing Individual Talent for Collaborative Impact
If you’re a Captain, you are as much a team assembler as you are a catalyst. You are intent on creating a company culture around values and mutual accountability. Comfortable with leading from behind, you trust your colleagues and culture to fulfill the vision for the company whose future you share. Unlike Explorers and Drivers, you find gratification in the we rather than the me. But as a Captain, you lead your teams with a trust-but-verify style that complements your focus on shared vision and values.
As difficult as it is for any builder to assemble a founding team of talented and dedicated colleagues, the challenges of attracting, retaining—and yes, pruning—the right talent to fuel growth are constant. Teams need to be recruited as well as rebooted from time to time.
And although Captains prefer a collaborative, consensus style of leadership and management, they know where they want the ship to go and what they must do to get there. They are motivated to build enterprises of enduring value by unleashing the productive potential of individuals and teams, even though circumstances sometimes force them to take the helm themselves to weather a storm or crisis.
John Crowley’s current company, Amicus, offers one such example. In the summer of 2013, his young daughter was having back surgery. Crowley was sleeping on the floor in the hospital room to be with her. His business was in crisis, financially and scientifically, and Crowley had to chart a course.
He recalls, “And then one day, early in the morning, I grabbed a pen and piece of paper and said, ‘Okay, lots of options. This is what we’re going to do: Disentangle ourselves from our big pharma partner and largest shareholder, fire our chief science officer, close our San Diego facility, let go of another twenty-five percent of the company, and raise money from a hedge fund at a brutally dilutive rate.’ The board signed up for all of it, and I executed all five of those pieces within forty-eight hours.”
That moment in the hospital room is classic Captain. Even under extraordinary pressure, this Captain’s pragmatic focus remained. He thought clearly to develop his plan. And because of the trust and alignment Crowley had worked hard to forge with his board, he could move swiftly and boldly.
In the ensuing months, Crowley basically refounded the company with a skeletal crew. “I think all those people who ultimately stayed, believed,” he says. “It wasn’t just the financial reward. We were proactively putting a pretty bold plan in place. We weren’t just taking our punches and letting things happen.”
If you are a corporate Captain, your leadership, management, and decision-making strengths make you a solid candidate to assume the Captain’s chair in an internal venture—even if the animating idea wasn’t yours to begin with. Perhaps it’s an internal project around an early prototype developed in your lab, or a fledgling new business scouting team backed by the executive suite. However it manifests itself, in our experience, it is important to let executive management know you’d like this kind of opportunity, so when one comes along, you may be considered to take the helm.
We saw this exact scenario unfold in a large energy company we advised. Our team had identified a promising new business idea that required a far more entrepreneurial style of leadership than the company was used to, with a different set of metrics and talents commensurate with the competitive obstacles this team would face. Rather than choose an outsider, the CEO tapped an up-and-coming executive with no prior startup experience, but with the widespread respect she could draw on in assembling her new team. Her insider credibility enabled her to quickly organize an effective cadre around her. These efforts in turn accelerated both the business idea’s time to market and the company’s ability to turn this idea into a multi-million-dollar venture in short order.
As a corporate Captain, you also know that success depends on the caliber of the team you recruit for the new venture. Watch for signs that your superiors or peers may sandbag your efforts by sloughing off B- or C-level talent to your fledgling undertaking. The venture you lead is likely to attract a lot of attention, even envy, among your peers. But remember, you’re not playing for the intramural championship here; you’ll be competing against outside pro players at every position. Make sure your team has the right mix of inside and outside draft picks you can coach to win.
Whether you are a Captain operating within your own stand-alone new business or are a corporate captain, you know the power of principle and the cohesion provided by culture—especially when you need to draw on these in times of crisis. You use both of these tools to attract, inspire and galvanize talent to create collectively and build for growth.
For those of you who are bored sitting through yet another PowerPoint presentation, especially after you’ve seen a few visually engaging TED-style talks, meet Peter Arvai. He’s more of a hybrid builder, blending both Captain and Crusader characteristics as a cofounder of Prezi, the software resource that helps over 75 million users—including many TED speakers—present their ideas more effectively. Born in Sweden to Hungarian parents, Peter noted that, growing up, “The word ‘entrepreneur’ did not exist in my vocabulary.”
Through various projects and ventures, he has long been inspired by this mission of “combining storytelling and technology to help people make better decisions.” He combines that Crusader’s fascination with a Captain’s focus on creating an authentic and unique culture of collaboration across multiple offices with employees from twenty-eight national backgrounds. “Purpose is the leading thing for me,” he says, and uses that to align his “middle way” leadership and management style—patience and support for his people while challenging and pushing them to new heights.
To win in the twenty-first century, you must empower others.
—Jack Ma, Alibaba
Jack Ma, the leading founder of Alibaba, captured the Captain’s collaborative style by assembling seventeen of his friends in his apartment and convincing them to invest in the idea that would become the largest e-commerce site on the planet.2 After fifteen years of tireless work and on the eve of the group’s initial public offering, Ma said to his employees, “After we go public, we will continue to adhere to the principle of ‘customer first, employee second, shareholder third.’”
He knows what it’s like to be on the other side of success. “I flunked my exam for university two times before I was accepted by what was considered my city’s worst university,” Ma reminisces. On graduating with a degree in English, he was rejected from twelve jobs for which he had applied, including one at KFC, before being hired as a schoolteacher earning just $12 a month.
Considered a failure by many, Ma was blessed with a far more important talent than getting good grades. “In my university,” he says, “I was elected student chairman and later became chairman of the city’s Students Federation.” So after two failed ventures and nothing to his name, Ma was nonetheless able to convince friends to back him.
Captains excel at empowering the people around them. As mentioned, they believe in we before me and use their extroverted nature to win friends as much as followers. They welcome collaboration and experimentation and seek input constantly.
These builders are deliberate in using their command authority and persona as well as their collegial style to inspire others for the benefit of their companies. “To win in the twenty-first century, you must empower others,” Ma says. “Then they love and respect you because you made their life important.”
The Customer Dynamic:
Transforming Buyers into Partners
If you’re a Captain, you may not be as directly or obsessively focused on convincing customers of your idea, solution, or mission as your Driver, Explorer, or Crusader counterparts are. They each see the customer as their point of validation. Of course, like all business builders, Captains think about customers, but more to understand the business model and how they themselves can create and extract value from the market. Let’s see how one Captain’s approach played out in the blueprinting business.
“We won’t bid on your request for a proposal, thank you very much.”
For fifteen years, Suri Suriyakumar, CEO of ARC Document Solutions, had been acquiring and rolling up a series of mom-and-pop architectural blueprint-making companies in the commercial construction industry. Where the value in this industry was once centered on service and the delivery of architectural designs on ammonia-stained paper, it has shifted in the digital age. Suriyakumar is a classic Captain. He has used his pragmatic business skills to identify a new set of problems physical blueprints cannot solve, but which his teams and their relationships can.
Captains are quite good at staying true to their company vision in guiding which business to pursue. Suriyakumar’s company was invited to submit a proposal for an $8 billion construction firm in Australia. On reading the specifications of the RFP, he and his team elected not to submit a proposal. They felt the client was seeking the wrong solution. This decision astonished the prospective customer, which moved forward with another vendor. Several months later, the CEO of that company called Suriyakumar and asked him why he had not submitted a proposal. Suriyakumar explained he felt the company was thinking about the problem entirely wrong: seeking price concessions for higher volumes of conventional blueprints.
The astonished CEO, who had never before been rebuffed by a vendor, invited Suriyakumar to fly to Australia to share his point of view. After listening intently to the CEO’s description of the business model, Suriyakumar then applied his own practical business logic. He explained that creating additional analog blueprints that would be used once and then relegated to a storage facility for decades was not a long-term solution for this global construction company. Rather, they should move all of their construction plans to a digital format and store them in the cloud so the information could be accessed throughout the useful life of the building and later to inform future construction companies, which would be called to either renovate or demolish the building. Suriyakumar and his team ended up winning the contract and forging a far deeper partnership than they ever could have created had they just competed for the original RFP.
As a Captain, you know the power of “listen first.” This instinct serves you well in both customer-facing and employee-engaging settings. It allows solutions and strategies to emerge from conversation, while demonstrating you have heard your customer or employee. You make them feel respected. You know that this engaged listening in turn breeds commitment, turning mere buyers into partners. It is your pattern of engagement that sometimes trumps the Driver’s product excellence, the Explorer’s solution wizardry, or even the Crusader’s noble cause.
The Sponsor Dynamic:
Aligning Financial and Other Supporters
In many ways, as a Captain, you are the favored son or daughter of financial sponsors, particularly for those who back well-led teams rather than ideas or markets. Your Builder Personality Type often has the seasoned wisdom that allows you to recruit and inspire teams that build companies of significant value, the dream of most investors. You are careful to maintain your credibility with investors, believing that everyone should be from Missouri (the Show Me State).
George McLaughlin is a highly successful serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and now builder and chairman of the board of American Specialty Foods. Like many Captains, he focuses on what is, rather than speculating on what might be. On the topic of financial projections, McLaughlin says, “When I started my career, I said, ‘I’m never gonna look at a projected profit and loss statement.’ They always have the appearance of precision, which leads people to over-believe in them, and yet the real business just never plays out that way.”
The following section describes how a Captain’s pragmatism and instinct for alignment, and the deep trust he engenders, can convert even a supplier into a source of capital.
Teams need captains, and vice versa—if you want to get things done.
—Mark Coopersmith, Sony e-commerce
When someone mentions the brand Sony, most of us think of great televisions and the PlayStation video-gaming console. Few of us think of e-commerce platforms. This is the story of a global consumer electronics brand actually inventing and ultimately spinning off just such a platform, which was created under the leadership of a corporate Captain named Mark Coopersmith.
It was the mid-1990s. Amazon was just getting under way as a books-only e-tailer. Most major players were not really sure how much effort to put into this new arena, given potential channel conflict. But Sony knew it needed to sell its products online. It also needed someone with a get-things-done reputation to spearhead this initiative.
The company assigned Coopersmith, an executive vice president of one of Sony’s business units, to the job. He was already working with most of the company’s electronics and content businesses. While all these businesses had started promoting products online, no group was yet selling directly to customers.
Coopersmith assembled a hybrid team of inside and outside engineers, product experts, marketers, and merchandisers. Comfortable with delegating, he became the orchestrator rather than the driver of the effort. He was, in effect, captain of a Lewis-and-Clark-style scouting team into the then frontier of the World Wide Web—dispatching his colleagues to identify and evaluate incumbent e-commerce solutions in the market.
He asked them if Sony should buy or build this new platform. Their answer: build. He then captained his team of programmers and online marketers while also running interference for them with senior management across Sony. Similar to today’s lean-startup approach, Coopersmith’s team had an early Sony web store up and running, securely accepting credit cards online within a very short time.
The team was located in San Francisco, away from Sony’s more formal US headquarters culture in New York. As Chris Pinkham understood when he was cracking the code for Amazon Web Services, physical (and cultural) distance from the mother ship can be a key element of the corporate builder’s success.
Leaders in other industries—companies like Hewlett-Packard, Pizza Hut, and BMW—were trying to figure out how to sell and serve customers online and soon asked about licensing Sony’s technology. These inquiries forced a strategic choice for Sony: keep the technology for its own use, or spin it out. Sony opted for the latter strategy.
Coopersmith went from corporate Captain to startup Captain. He raised outside funding from a group of investors and later sold the company for a handsome return. After a series of subsequent transactions, the platform his team built is now part of Google.
“Turn your supplier into an investor so you can roll up your competitors.”
The blueprinting industry was composed of thousands of small geographically distributed businesses, most of which were being run by their original owners, who were getting close to retirement age. With their fundamental business model and underlying technology in decline, most of these small-business owners faced limited prospects for cashing out, despite their solid regional customer network.
Suriyakumar saw an opportunity to create value by rolling up these businesses and thereby creating scale, operating efficiencies, and geographic scope advantages to serve national construction companies. He also saw the chance to upgrade both the management and the overall professionalism of these operations. He figured the increased efficiency could quickly translate into bottom-line profit and the geographic reach would accelerate revenue. Aside from the challenge of convincing these owners to sell their businesses, he also needed the capital to do it.
Suriyakumar realized he might be able to solve two problems at once—lower his supply costs and get the capital to launch this roll-up strategy. Not surprisingly for a business that was still paper-based, paper is the largest single expense. Suriyakumar went to his paper distributor on the West Coast with the following proposition: “I can give you all the paper volume from three different blueprinting companies. By consolidating all this volume with you and taking it away from your competitor, you will become one of the largest distributors in your market. I just need you to help me finance the three acquisitions.”
He further leveraged his buying power with this supplier-turned-investor by negotiating a 10 percent price discount in return for a three-year paper contract. This is Captain-style value creation. Identify the opportunity to create value, leverage relationship and negotiating skills, and—voilà!—an enormous amount of value creation out of thin air.
As a Captain, you seek alignment and win-win arrangements, unlike Drivers, who tend to see the game in more zero-sum terms, in which each win tends to come at someone else’s expense. Your approach is also different from that of Explorers, who are more intrigued by the system and its mechanics and are less likely to think win-win. Finally, your Crusader cousins also seek alignment in the ecosystem, but often tend to do so more through mission than economic interests.
The Scale Dynamic:
Elevating the Business
If you are a Captain, you are well equipped to anticipate and handle the challenges of this growth dynamic. You’re a pragmatist, unlikely to remain enamored with your product, solution, or mission if circumstances warrant otherwise. This is not to say you improvise everything; your decision making is deliberate and disciplined.
You are willing to upgrade systems, procedures, and technology and switch out underperformers, all in the quest of growth. You build a strong culture as one of the key mechanisms to convert mission into something tangible and emotionally motivating that everyone can get behind. You imprint your personality on your organization by attracting others, directing them through a clear mission and vision and maintaining a transparent, direct relationship based on clarity of responsibility and corresponding accountability. In other words, culture is not just a nice-to-have for you; it is a platform for scaling the enterprise.
“I recruit employees according to their values, by getting to know how they live their lives.”
Cindy Monroe, builder and CEO of Thirty-One Gifts, is an archetypal Captain in this regard. The genesis of her business was a discussion with one of her friends from church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They thought if they could help their friends generate $200 to $300 more each month, they would ease the financial challenges of raising a family. Monroe created a handbag, and her friend hosted a party with other women from church to see how many might be interested in purchasing it. The company name came from the biblical inspiration for this simple help-each-other idea, Proverbs 31. That business is now on its way to generating $1 billion in sales, with more than a hundred thousand women hosting similar parties each year.
Monroe’s management skills were often tested as she scaled this juggernaut of a business. One of the more profound challenges happened four years after she founded the company, when she realized she needed a more retail-savvy employee base. She moved the company from Chattanooga to Columbus, Ohio. Her dedication to her early employees was so deep that her company relocated more than twenty families to Ohio.
With clarity of mission and expectations for integrated team-based performance, she soon discovered that some of these dedicated employees lacked the skills necessary to continue scaling the business. She explains, “We hired friends who helped us grow the business in the early days, but as the business grew we needed different skill sets and had to encourage some of our closest friends to move on to other opportunities.” Team first, but not at the expense of performance.
Cindy explains, “I recruit employees according to their values, by getting to know how they live their lives and how they make business decisions.” Her business is increasingly dependent on a headquarters staff tightly in synch with the company mission. The approach seems to be working for her and the company’s legions of party hosts.
You can’t ask others to invest more than you’re investing yourself.
—Chris Bischof, Eastside College Preparatory School
Builders start and grow nonprofit ventures as well as for-profit businesses. For them, organizational survival may be just as important a success indicator as scale is for businesses. By that measure, Chris Bischof, the Captain who built Eastside College Preparatory School, now entering its third decade in economically challenged East Palo Alto, California, demonstrates the importance of this style of team engagement. He humbly credits his team’s shared passion about the school’s expanding mission, but his own team-first, lead-by-example style speaks volumes about the importance of his ongoing frontline engagement: “I think the most effective leaders are those who lead by example. You can’t ask others to invest more than you’re investing yourself. For me, one of the most rewarding aspects of leading an organization is the shared commitment among our staff. Together we’re learning through experience and coming up with creative solutions to address the challenges we face in meeting our goals. I think getting the participation of everyone involved leads to a much more fulfilling working environment and far better solutions than any one of us could develop on our own.”
That’s a Captain talking, for sure.
“The we is stronger than the me.”
Margery Kraus, the Captain who built APCO Worldwide, describes her approach to scaling through culture: “If you believe in culture, then you have to go out and preserve it. You have to hire the right people. You have to make sure they understand what the values of the company are, and you have to carry that forward. You can walk into an APCO office almost anywhere in the world, and the culture will surround you. People left good jobs to come into the firm because they saw something very different. To do that, everybody had to believe in a common set of values: the we is stronger than the me.”
That’s a Captain speaking. If you’re a Captain, the cultural values you instill in your team help you achieve scale. A collaborative culture allows you to hire, empower others, and expand the company at a rate not often possible using any other method. It is one of the keys to your success.
The Captain’s Gifts and Gaps
As a Captain, you often start building a new business by identifying and exploiting commonsense-based commercial opportunities (even if the idea wasn’t yours originally), but you are careful not to crowd out your team. In this regard, you are unlike Drivers and Explorers, who attach their egos to commercial success and systematic solutions, respectively. You tend to stay above the fray, a vantage point that can strengthen your focus on people and teams. However, in fast-changing and highly competitive markets, this tendency can potentially leave your venture vulnerable.
Here is a quick summary of your gifts and gaps:
- Forming and empowering the team: As a Captain, you are attuned to what motivates your team. You apply your considerable listening skills and understanding of the way others take on responsibility and feel accountable, and you deftly deploy the right people to the right assignments to get the most out of their talents. We saw this gift on full display in how Margery Kraus connected her APCO team to serve her firm’s clients through collaborating in a way other firms had not discovered. This integration of different skills, cultivated by Kraus, allowed her to lead APCO’s emergence as a market leader.
- Managing through vision alignment: One of your most effective tools in achieving alignment with both internal teams and external suppliers and customers is your clarity and consistency in managing according to the vision. We saw how important vision alignment was to Paul Gilbert in his building and scaling of MedAvante and to Suriyakumar as he leveraged supplier financing to roll up blueprinting firms.
- Willingness to make the tough calls on people: The complementary strength to empowering your team is that you don’t hesitate to remove underperformers. We saw John Crowley do this at a key juncture in building Amicus, when he realized he did not have all the right people on his team. Cindy Monroe did the same at Thirty-One Gifts, even after she had moved close friends—some of whom, she later discovered, were not cut out for the next chapter of growth for her company—all the way to Columbus from Chattanooga.
- Overreliance on consensus: One risk for Captains involves how much empowerment you afford your team. This challenge can be particularly damaging in fast-moving markets, when rapid, decisive action is required. While Crowley is a shining counterexample of this pitfall, many Captains tend to wait too long to act as they garner the consensus that makes them comfortable to act. Corporate Captains are particularly vulnerable to this challenge.
- Remaining too far from the action: There can be a fine line between delegation and falling out of touch with your customers, your competitors, and the market in general. Your behind-the-scenes style can leave you too far removed from the front lines, where your company and its competitors are addressing real customer needs and are developing solutions for those needs.
- Accepting incrementalism as a substitute for innovation: While you have a good nose for the next commercial opportunity to serve or expand your relationship with current customers, it’s important you don’t allow your team just to satisfice, that is, to meet only the minimum response to a need, particularly in rapidly changing markets. Mercurial markets can require a bolder and more aggressive pursuit of new ideas.
So what can you do now to start improving your overall effectiveness as a Captain? Here are six actions you can take, depending on your preference for elevating your gifts, compensating for your gaps, or employing some mix of both.
“Elevate and Delegate” Strategies to Become a Stronger Captain
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Keep a sharp eye out for the next champion on your already-solid team: Your building strength relies on enormously talented team members inspired by you and your vision for the company. Chris Dries is a Captain and the CEO of United Silicon Carbide, a developer and manufacturer of silicon chips that enable higher power efficiency for a greener product. The story of how he hired his vice president of engineering, who he says was “the best guy I’ve ever worked with in my career,” typifies this gift of recognizing potential talent. “Hiring him was a pivotal moment,” he says. “It’s hard to explain how transformative that one individual was in the early stages of this business.”
First, Dries invited this executive, who headed up the engineering function of a publicly traded company, to interview Dries’s nascent team—a step that immediately demonstrated the open and honest culture he had forged. After an intensive weekend with Dries and his team, this enormously talented engineering leader was convinced of the team’s value. He not only joined the team, but also invested in the company, contributing a significant check to the next round of financing. Dries’s aiming high in the talent game and his enfranchising such a player represent an invaluable Captain technique.
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Share the Captain’s chair to show and teach others how you lead: With your direct, honest, consistent communication, you are arguably the most effective leader of all Builder Types. You set clear goals and expectations and then delegate responsibility for execution. This form of leadership comes to you intuitively, but others not so naturally endowed can learn much from you. Pick out a few individuals (perhaps at different levels of the organization), and take them under your wing—almost like students you are coaching.
You’ll need to do more than just model this approach; you’ll need to explain it and compare notes with your mentees on its finer points. You might allow them to shadow you for a week or maybe give them a spot at the table where they can practice your Captain’s repertoire under your watchful eye—a kind of “Captain for the meeting” session. Although your leadership talents are distinctive, some of them are teachable in more structured training contexts focused on collaborative leadership skills.
We understand you’re running a business, not a business school. But your leadership style is a resource that can be leveraged into a value-creating, even value-transforming, resource—precisely because it can unleash your colleagues’ latent creative talent and ingenuity other Builder Types may struggle to capture.
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Avoid confusing your teams with your twin strengths of listening and consensus building: Your we-over-me default style can open up the reservoir of creativity and commitment that sparks future innovation and creates an environment in which slipups and failures may be more openly acknowledged. However, some of your followers can mistake your patient listening and preference for consensus as an indication you are not prepared to make tough, unpleasant decisions when necessary.
Having seen only your velvet glove, they may be surprised—and even disillusioned—if circumstances call for an iron fist from time to time. Make sure your colleagues understand your actions when you use this technique, because, otherwise, it can confuse or even scare them into the very kind of silent obedience you probably don’t want.
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Remember that consensus is wonderful, except when it’s not: While your leadership is often strengthened by your ability to forge consensus, sometimes you must go it alone. Yet those are precisely the times when you can leverage the trust you have built to win over your naysayers after the fact. As described earlier, John Crowley needed to do exactly this to reorient—indeed even jumpstart again—his company, using the game plan he had fashioned from those lonely moments in his child’s hospital room.
Your consensus management style can be powerful. But when quick decisions on complex issues are called for, such an approach can be problematic. Think of the price firms like BlackBerry and Nokia paid for their version of indecision—in both cases caught like deer in Apple’s headlights.3 Even in slower-moving markets, like the inexorable digital takeover of film photography, a culture of consensus—reinforced by complacency and self-confidence—can prove fatal, as it did for both Kodak and Polaroid. Crises and consensus often don’t go together.
June Ressler, builder of Cenergy International Services, a Houston-based staffing and consulting agency serving the energy and offshore drilling sector, is a good role model for her fellow Captains in this regard. Ressler told us she doesn’t like relying on written sales reports: “It’s so funny, my brain doesn’t work like that. The only way I get comfort is I listen to our sales call every Monday morning from eight thirty to nine thirty, while I am driving to work—so I’m in my car and I’m listening. When I get in the car, I say [to myself], ‘I am not going to say a word this time,’ and then invariably I’m, like, pushing mute, ‘Oh and by the way, did you do that?’ You know, I just can’t help myself.” So sometimes even a consensus-oriented Captain can’t resist taking a more Driver-esque stance. In this case, perhaps that’s not surprising—Ressler is a former practicing lawyer who races Formula 4 cars in her spare time.
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Push your teams to look beyond incremental improvements: Your pragmatic focus on what’s next suits you well at making steady progress on many fronts. But gradualism can foster a kind of inadvertent complacency and a false sense of confidence if your fundamental business, business model, or technology is stagnating or in decline.
Not all members of your team may have the skill, insight, or guts to interpret and synthesize the kind of emerging signals the marketplace can send. Time constraints can inhibit the team’s ability to get up to speed, consider options, and, ultimately, make a decision. But you bear the leader’s responsibility to see for yourself and to keep track of those “disturbances in the Force”—as Obi-Wan Kenobi of Star Wars might say—that may prove your undoing. And that means getting out of the building, meeting with customers, and checking out competitors and startups geographically or competitively near you—regardless of the scouting reports you may have been getting from inside your inner circle.
In Paul Gilbert’s case at MedAvante, he realized he must avoid the complacency trap and coalesced his team around a gut-wrenching and bet-the-company Captain’s call. His company had been focused entirely on measuring the efficacy of new prospective mental health drugs, a therapeutic area that was showing troubling signs of slowing, though still profitable. Gilbert decided to divert scarce resources to develop a clinical testing protocol to measure the effectiveness of new Alzheimer’s drugs. The payoff? In Gilbert’s words, “We won something like eleven of the next thirteen contracts, so as psychiatry was shrinking rapidly, we were able to pivot into Alzheimer’s, which was a large and growing area . . . [H]ad we not . . . gone after Merck [the original Alzheimer’s disease contractor], we wouldn’t be here today—because psychiatry shrank too far, too fast.”
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Renew your trust-but-verify style by personal example: As a Captain, you probably have an almost instinctive feel for the importance of establishing trust in your organizational culture. You get what the Great Place To Work Institute (the company behind those “Great Places To Work” lists in Fortune and other publications around the world) has found: trust is essential, both vertically between bosses and workers and horizontally among peers.4 But that trust, while hard to build, is easy to lose if you’re not constantly renewing it through working side by side with your team.
As a Captain, consider the suggestions we offer as a starting point for how you can become a stronger builder. Each suggestion is a function of our having analyzed, worked with, and invested in many Captains. However, your growth opportunities are unique to you. The generalizable point is that you have many leadership gifts. These tend to enhance the alignment and performance of your team on day-to-day issues, but as we’ve seen with each Builder Personality, various dispositions also have their drawbacks. If you are a Captain, your personality can lead to incremental, rather than bold growth. We encourage you to consider our further suggestions in chapter 9 in your pursuit of becoming a master builder.
