Why Startup Employees Act Like Children and How (Not) to Fix It
Hiring and managing employees is more similar to parenting than most startup founders would like.
As I began scaling my first venture-backed tech company, I ran into an unexpected challenge: Everyone in the company seemed to be getting resentful because they felt like other people weren’t working hard enough. I suppose I should mention the entire company was remote. While that detail surely doesn’t seem interesting today, in 2023, my experience happened a decade ago. It was pre-pandemic and before tools like Zoom and Facetime were widely used. As a result, being remote meant significantly less face-to-face communication, which my co-founder and I assumed was the source of the problem. We concluded that enabling people to see each other more often would help them realize everyone was working equally as hard, and the resentment would fade away.
To address the issue, we made what was, in retrospect, the stupidest purchase I ever made as a startup founder. It was for a bulk order of iPad minis so everyone in the company could have always-on video screens that allowed us to simulate being in an office together.
On its surface, the idea seemed logical enough, but the results were terrible. The iPads ultimately created so many more problems that, within two weeks, we completely gave up on the idea.
After that, I stashed my little iPad mini in the back of a drawer and never used it again. Simply looking at it reminded me of the frustrating problem the iPads were supposed to help my startup solve but couldn’t.
The great laundry fight
I was reminded of the same problem this past weekend. But I wasn’t working on a startup or using an iPad. Instead, I was folding laundry with my two daughters.
The girls are still young — only four and seven — so they don’t have many responsibilities, but my wife and I make them help us with their laundry. Naturally, it’s a chore they despise. Sure, we try making it fun by watching movies or playing music at the same time, but, inevitably, most sessions devolve into a huge fight. I swear, we spend more time fighting about doing laundry than the time it takes to actually do the laundry.
This past weekend seemed to be going differently. My wife was at the gym, so my girls and I were folding by ourselves and actually making good progress. However, when my wife got home, she stopped into the room where my daughters and I were folding laundry. At that point, rather than welcoming their mother home, my girls began throwing fits because she wasn’t helping. They told her how mean she was for making them do laundry, that it wasn’t fair they had to do it while she didn’t, and that she needed to fold the rest of the clothes herself. In other words, it was exactly the kind of behavior you’d expect from young children being asked to do their chores. So why did it remind me of my startup?
Just like my daughters were mad at their mother because they felt like she wasn’t contributing equally to the household, the employees in my small company thought their coworkers weren’t working as hard. We figured the issue was not being able to see each other, but the iPads quickly disproved that. The devices actually made the problem worse by capturing only a tiny rectangle where people occasionally sat. What if someone had a meeting? What if someone had to go to the bathroom? Or what if someone lost Internet connection for a few minutes and simply forgot to turn their iPad back on? Rather than helping everyone on the team stay connected, the always-on screens became prominent reminders of when people weren’t sitting at their desks. As a result, the iPads made team members even more resentful toward each other in the same way seeing my wife actually made my daughters more upset about doing their laundry.
Avoid childish arguments
With a bit more distance and perspective, I’ve begun to realize and appreciate that the iPads were a bad choice because they legitimized the problem. Specifically, by distributing iPads, I was signaling to my employees that the only legitimate way to contribute to the company was by sitting at a desk in front of a computer screen. But that’s a childish way of recognizing how people contribute to a team. It’s like what my daughters were doing with their mom.
My wife is a wonderful mother who spends more time most days supporting her kids and their needs than she does helping herself. Heck, even the example I referenced earlier of her going to the gym is a way of supporting the family. It’s not something she does because she loves exercising. It’s something she does because she appreciates that staying fit and healthy makes her a better mother.
But my daughters — being only four and seven — are too young to appreciate that type of nuance. Instead, in their little-kid brains, if a parent isn’t there to help with whatever menial chore they’ve been assigned, it means that parent is off having all sorts of wild fun.
That kind of naivety is forgivable in children, but why does it happen in startups, too?
The truth is, being part of a startup is a lot like being a child. By that I mean children are trapped in complex environments they don’t fully understand or control. Within this environment, their growth happens so slowly that they usually struggle to think about the perspectives and relationships of other people around them. Instead, they’re always thinking about themselves and what they need to do in order to grow faster.
Startups cultivate a similar environment. The complexity of startups combined with the exhausting amounts of individual work and slow progress often make startup employees feel isolated. This is true even when teams are physically together. As a result, startup employees often struggle to appreciate the contributions others are making to their team’s progress. When this happens, it breeds resentment and animosity that can cripple otherwise great companies.
In situations like these, it’s a founder’s job to act like a parent and find some way of helping employees see and understand the bigger picture as well as their roles in it regardless of what other people in the org are doing. Unfortunately, just like being a parent, accomplishing this work isn’t easy. In fact, preventing startup employees from feeling like their co-workers aren’t contributing enough is one of the hardest problems a startup founder has to solve when scaling a team. Even when you think you have the problem solved, it creeps up again in completely unexpected ways. While I don’t have a great solution to share, I can tell you what you shouldn’t do: Don’t buy everyone iPads.
