1/ Most of your startup team members will fall into the camp of individual contributors, especially in young companies where you hired, typically, young people against specific tasks and goals.

2/ Creating a network of leaders to help you scale your business is one of the most efficient way for you to build a strong and sustainable fabric and leverage your powers 100X over.

3/ You can create the conditions under which happens, and nurture your best talent into leadership. I’m not talking about only your VPs and leadership team, but about everyone in your company.

4/ Some advice on how to do it.

5/ Communicate with absolute clarity mission and overall company goals. Get everyone to feel responsible for the overall success of the company. Move your team away from thinking only about their own team’s goals but to understand and embrace the overall company objectives.

6/ Think of your company in terms of end-to-end flows and not discrete tasks, so engineering understands how their efforts impact sales and sales understands the constraints of product and engineering. Acting as one has never been more important.

7/ Empower your people to design and implement new solutions that enable you to function better as a distributed organisation. Perhaps create a 10% free time period that is designated for process improvements and “how to function better” in this new environment.

8/ Let your team embrace discomfort. Empowerment means allowing for failure. Be supportive but resist the urge to be a saviour or to take things over. Let your people iterate to a positive conclusion with your guidance, support and input, but let them own it; failures included.

9/ This is how your team members will develop resilience, but also recognise their own achievements as meaningful.

10/ Encourage organic leadership. Your key contributors may not be who you expect them to be. Leadership is earned and will emerge naturally as team members naturally recognise those willing to embrace it.

11/ Be of service. It will make you happy, and it will work.

12/ GIANT CAVEAT. This only works if people “stay in their lane” which is on the face of it contradictory, but actually core to the system working. People need to know their role and sometimes whisper to themselves, to borrow from @scottbelsky , “just do your fucking job”.

13/ If you do all this well you will move from having individual, goal-oriented contributors to having a platoon of leaders. And that is a fabulous competitive advantage.

All in this new post: https://medium.com/@fdestin/developing-leaders-in-a-time-of-crisis-bc7d022fd279

14/ Hat tip @ShaneAParrish and the Knowledge Project podcast with @JohnMaxwellTeam for inspiring this thread.