The Driver as Master Builder:
“Release the Wheel, Empower like a Captain”

The monolithic product and market focus of the Driver can crowd out the development of this personality’s broader leadership skills, which are the Captain’s gifts. Let’s take a more careful look at how this plays out across the stages of scaling the business.

In the startup of your business, if you’re a Driver, your laser-like focus and gift of sensing market direction enabled you to fit your initial product to the market and win over early employees, customers, and investors. Now, over the first few stages of growth, your energy and tenacity can continue to be the propulsion. However, as the business grows to hundreds of employees who are working across geographically disparate offices, not even Drivers have the power and reach to direct and motivate the way they did in the early days.

At these latter stages of scale and beyond, all builders need motivated, capable building crews. The assembling of such crews is the particular gift of the Captain. So, as a Driver, if you aspire to the master builder strategy, you should look to borrow from the strengths and techniques of the Captain, your polar complement. A Captain approaches building through others in a deliberate manner and sows the seeds early, well before they must be reaped. This builder sees his or her primary role as attracting and cultivating talent. A Captain does this with a careful eye on the skills needed for both today’s and tomorrow’s levels of scale.

Drivers should learn early to begin overhiring for each role by selecting people who may be somewhat overqualified today but are well prepared to handle scaling. Overhiring for key roles has the benefit of correcting another Driver tendency. Drivers’ natural inclination is to hold on to the wheel, as opposed to training and teaching others to handle it. When you overhire for a key role, more-experienced people will probably require you to back off or they will not accept or stay in the position.

The other technique you can borrow from Captains is their ability to build scalable, empowered teams with very clear roles, responsibility, and accountability. This clarity can temper your overcontrolling instincts. If you can let go of the specifics but retain clear accountability for results, you may achieve the desired outcome without having to do it all yourself. Focus on what your team members get done, not so much on how they do it.

You may well find that by broadening your objective from market success at all costs to team success, you can achieve the former through succeeding with the latter. This perspective comes easily to the Captain, but requires Drivers to choose between their ambition for impact and their need for control. The very thing that allowed the Driver to achieve one level of success now holds him or her back.

Adam Jackson, the cofounder of Doctor On Demand introduced earlier in the book, came to terms with this tension in early 2016, when he handed the leadership reins of his company to a more experienced builder who had recently been a senior leader at PayPal. Jackson told us, “I reconcile things in order of the goals. The goal for me is to build the biggest and most successful behemoth in our space. So I must recruit those who are better than me, empower them, communicate the vision clearly, and let go.” Drivers who attain the skills of a master builder combine their native product-and market-sensing gifts with the leadership skills of the Captain.

The Explorer as Master Builder:
“Adopt the Human Touch of the Crusader”

If you are an Explorer, your systems thinking serves you well across the more mechanical aspects of the business, such as translating ideas into products, engaging sophisticated customers and investors, and planning for scaling the business. However, you may not be tapping your followers’ human need for purpose and mission beyond the problem-solving core on which you have built the business.

Explorers derive confidence and control over the world around them by studying and then developing an integrated understanding of the mechanism or system at play. As you become better at solving the mechanics of problems, your confidence builds. With that can come a bit of a superiority complex that may drive a wedge between you and the team scaling the business. An executive coach or psychologist might call this depersonalizing the relationship. We call it taking the humanity out.

The key to scaling an already-successful business is to raise the level of commitment to the purpose of the enterprise above mere role and responsibility. Explorers who can create this higher-order purpose for the work end up recruiting and inspiring an entirely different level of workforce and, with it, increase their ability to scale.

As an Explorer, you should learn how to reach your followers on a more emotional rather than just a purely intellectual, commercial, or professional level. For this reason, the best teacher to help you become a master builder is the Crusader, your polar complement. Crusaders motivate and align others through an empathic connection with individuals across their organizations. Mark Bonfigli pursued this exact path as he saw the system at play in creating a high-energy culture with workout facility and costume parties to boot. As an Explorer, you have a set of preferences you can build on. You value honesty and transparency, which can be the building blocks of a deep and trusting relationship. These characteristics are necessary, but not sufficient.

An Explorer is often more concerned about being right, which he or she sees as a form of honesty, regardless of the emotional impact on coworkers. As an Explorer, you need to move beyond the safety of this form of honesty to one far scarier, one based on making yourself emotionally available and perhaps even vulnerable in your professional relationships.

Crusaders can teach you how to communicate and manage from a central mission and form an empathic connection to each member of your crew. It is that very mission that brought the Crusader into entrepreneurship in the first place. So we are not suggesting you become a missionary like the Crusader, but rather we are encouraging you to use mission as a managerial tool to reach and inspire others emotionally.

As mentioned earlier, Crusaders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield provided their employees with such a sense of purpose that their workers would come in on weekends with their own tools to make sure the ice cream was being made correctly. Later, as the founders’ business grew to several hundred million dollars in revenues, they imbued it with a sense of social mission, allowing employees to take time off from work to attend rallies in the famous branded Cowmobile (the brightly painted truck featuring cows in a Vermont field).

This socially aware mission with a Vermont folksy style might seem goofy to the engineering mind of an Explorer. But you should look below the surface to discover the underlying mechanism at play. Cohen and Greenfield figured out a way to ensure the company they were building provided a sense of meaning and greater purpose in the lives of their employees, by baking (or perhaps churning) that ethos into the company. The committed employees then recruited like-minded folks to help scale the business.

In summary, if your hard-edged systems thinking as an Explorer softened to include the motivating mission of the Crusader, you might be unstoppable!

The Crusader as Master Builder:
“Borrow the Explorer’s Systematic Approach”

Crusaders generate tremendous momentum from their mission and the charismatic way in which they get their employees, customers, and investors to follow them. As we have just said, Crusaders often lack a strong ability to operationalize the business at each level of scale—a natural strength of the Explorer.

So how can you become a master builder? Look to the systematic strengths of the Explorer, who can return the favor we suggested in the previous section.

You can learn much from your Explorer cousin—the master mechanic. But how might a compassionate and intuitive builder learn from one wired in the opposing manner? We believe the bridge to the Explorer’s systems thinking lies in the Crusader’s ability to sense and then capitalize on areas of misalignment. Both these builders are tapping into an understanding of the system at play.

The Explorer does this through a fact-based analysis, while the Crusader does so through an intuitive sense of needs and wants. If as a Crusader you can see operational issues through your sense of alignment, you may be on the path to adopting the Explorer’s operational strengths, but you’ll do so in your own way.

The Captain as Master Builder:
“Test-Drive How the Driver Masters Market Changes and Product Fit”

Captains, as we have noted, are often the most well-rounded builders of our four. If you are a Captain, your innate strength is in selecting, assigning, and encouraging others to work collaboratively and tenaciously toward the common vision of the company. You are honest and transparent and thereby create a deep sense of trust across your employee base. You build and manage through others, holding each person accountable for clearly defined results.

So on what basis and from which fellow builder can you best learn if you want to pursue your own master builder strategy? We believe the Driver is your polar complement as a Captain. As we identified earlier, the Driver has much to learn from the Captain, but the inverse is also true, particularly as the company enters more competitive and faster-moving market conditions, which tend to accelerate with scale. As a Captain, you can enhance your effectiveness over time by taking on the problem- or solution-centered strengths of the Driver and Explorer, but without the overbearing ego of either of those Builder Types.

Recall that the Captains we have met tend to launch their businesses with a simple and pragmatic insight. Think of Suri Suriyakumar, who began to roll up small blueprinting operations, creating paper-purchasing efficiencies and geographic coverage to serve national construction firms. By late 2016, he was beginning to offer his clients cloud storage and retrieval capabilities for the blueprints his company created to inform a building’s maintenance and, ultimately, its demolition over its full life cycle.

Under the master builder strategy, the Driver can provide you with a role model on how to ensure market shifts do not end up surprising you, leaving your pragmatic business out of touch with customers’ underlying needs and wants. Recall how conscientiously Mi Jong Lee observed the underlying needs of her fashion customers. She was so in touch with their evolving needs that she was able to adapt with them, as opposed to being passed by in the fast-moving world of fashion.

To become better at discerning the market’s changing path, you need to face one important challenge. You have to be willing to pull the team, and perhaps even yourself, out of its comfort zone. The bridge to operating against your preference for empowerment lies in your ambition. In fast-moving markets you may need to use your ambition to help you operate against your natural inclination and sacrifice a bit of team spirit to make a strategic pivot. Perhaps you can succeed by getting to the answer first, as Suriyakumar did, and then guiding your team to the product or market insight you have already gleaned.

Having opened this chapter with John Crowley’s trajectory on the master builder path, we’ll close with another example of how a builder can expand her repertoire—using one style to buffer the downside of another.

As a builder, you have undoubtedly learned, adapted, and grown dramatically as you’ve launched and managed your business thus far. We know what a grind the building process can be. We hope the strategies of this chapter and insights from earlier chapters will reinforce your enthusiasm for the challenge and rewards of building for growth.

A Closing Note

If building for growth is the imperative for your business, personality matters. Who you are shapes how you build your business, your team, and your ability to win. We hope this book has made this challenging imperative more achievable. Now you can decode, understand, and find your path to becoming a stronger builder—whether you’re a Driver, an Explorer, a Crusader, or a Captain.

We have shown cobuilders how to vet and then fuse deeper and more productive partnerships, while supporting both them and their crews in identifying and selecting crew members who best match their goals and styles. And finally, we have suggested ways in which builders, investors, and corporate sponsors should select one another to maximize alignment of goals, approach, and style.

The task of building businesses of enduring value from scratch is enormously challenging. There are so many factors at play—things we can see, like competitors’ actions, to things we cannot, such as secret technology breakthroughs. Macroeconomic forces buffet, buoy, or destroy, and of course, sheer luck is always playing behind the scenes.

Amid all these forces, personality is the one resource you the builder can control. Your personality is never as perfect or as flawed as you, your biggest fans, or your harshest critics may believe. But it is a uniquely powerful resource you can understand and leverage for greater impact. We hope we have armed you with the tools, stories, and practical suggestions on how to do just that.

Regardless of your Builder Personality, your work of starting, growing, and scaling your business is a vital endeavor that creates opportunity and fuels prosperity. Our economy, our societies, and our world depend on the growth your success makes possible.

Simply put, we need you, your team, and your business to be built for growth.