Founders: What do you want your legacy to be?

Many of us are familiar with the horror stories of company founders who’ve been dramatically pushed out after getting drunk with power and behaving outrageously…to their employees, their investors and to the public. Uber founder Travis Kalanick, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, and WeWork’s Adam Neumann are household names from the amount of media coverage their respective meltdowns received.

When the founders of nonprofits run amok, however, they tend not to get so much press. But for those of us who’ve been around the sector for a while, we’ve seen plenty of Founder’s Syndrome. The consulting firm Funding For Good defines it succinctly:

“Founder’s syndrome happens when charismatic leaders are unable to let go or grow. This person or group of people has often founded the organization or saved it from the brink. Yet over time, they are unable to evolve to meet the changing needs of their organization—leading to conflicts, power struggles, and internal dysfunction.”

Some of the common symptoms include making all of the decisions, micromanaging staff at all levels, holding all the donor relationships, guarding resources, refusing to consider succession planning and disregarding norms of roles and responsibilities. Does this sound familiar?

It’s not all that surprising. Founders believe passionately in a big idea and put all their personal capital, persuasive abilities and time and energy into realizing that vision. But success doesn’t necessarily beget success. Because the skills, talents and energies that go into launching an enterprise and galvanizing support are not necessarily the skills, talents and energies that are needed for leading, managing and sustaining an organization. Time and again, founders drive away staff, undermine management and find creative ways to maintain control even when other leaders are brought in.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Confronted with Founder’s Syndrome, I started talking to a number of founders with whom I’ve worked to try to understand how some charismatic founders have written a different script for themselves. My conclusion? It’s not all that complicated. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

What it takes is for the founder to start by asking themselves some questions:

·      What do I want the future to be for this organization?

·      What do I want my role to be and how do I want to spend my time?

·      How do I share power?

When I’ve witnessed leaders stuck in the vortex of founder’s syndrome, they’re not loving it. Feeling responsible for every little detail, they’re working nights and weekends to try to stay on top of everything. And they live daily with the heavy pressure of fundraising to keep the organization going and growing. So really, they stand to gain by taking a hard look at how they could do things differently.

The founders I spoke with who’ve successfully made the transition and whose organizations have continued to flourish are ones who figured out that though they are great at many things, they’re not great at everything. There are multiple paths, but here are a few that I heard about:

·      A founder who realized that his top priorities were to make a reasonable living and to be around to raise his kids. Once he figured that out, he built a team to run things on a day-to-day basis. A breakthrough moment was that he planned his vacation for the week his organization launched their new revenue-generating platform, which they’d been working on for over a year.

·      A founder who responded to her board’s skillful intervention by working hard on herself with both her executive coach and her therapist. A breakthrough moment was that she contracted for leadership development training for her senior team.

·      A serial founder who always recognized the difference between starting something and running something, and who saw clearly where his strengths lay. A breakthrough moment was that he recruited his successor and stepped back to create the space for her to succeed.

It takes tremendous courage and commitment to found a nonprofit, and I have so much respect for the brave founders who put their shoulders to the wheel to make it happen. And it also takes a ton of courage and commitment for founders to acknowledge their limitations and act in the best interests of their organization. It is those founders who leave a strong legacy and inspire the leaders who follow in their footsteps.