Bottoms Up!
June 17, 2008 | by Clayton Stobbs
Well I was struggling for ideas today but luckily Andrew fed me some good material to expand upon. Thus far in my ‘career’ I’ve dealt with basically the entire spectrum of management styles and have seen how large a role that can play in organizations/groups. Like most people, I’ve had leadership that limited delegation of power and duties completely, ensuring that our roles were fixed and certain. Other leadership has given total leeway in how things are done and allowed challenges to be solved by any (ethical) means. Each style has its advantages and disadvantages but for this post I wanted to delve a bit into how Startup Weekend has really shown the benefit of bottom-up leadership.
As you may or may not know, weekends are put together and launched when a local organizer elicits interest, finds a location and solidifies a date. From there, we come on board and help with the rest and are there for questions/support/experience but really, organization is almost totally bottom-up. There is no one delegating tasks, giving orders, or requiring TPS reports every Friday and that is part of what makes the weekends such a great community event. Everyone attending the weekend and participating can take responsibility for their own success and weekend communities are stronger for that reason. Absolutely great people pull together to make the events happen and motivation is something that seems to be naturally instilled in the startup community.
This somewhat laissez-fair approach was put in place by Andrew and has yet to really hit any obstacles. With the groups of people that come together at these events, overt control would completely kill the creativity and vibe that is part of these events. Further, the startups and projects coming out of these weekends are not bueracratic monsters with a six level hierarchy of leadership (I hope) and so this works best.
It’s fair to say that every situation has unique characteristics that require a certain leadership structure (military vs. coffee shop) but in our case, bottom-up simply fits. I’d be interested to hear any thoughts on startup leadership structure and yes, this is an opinion post.
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Tags: bottom-up, leadership
