Playing the Long Game in Entrepreneurship: Scaling Beyond the Product
This week, we had the pleasure of co-hosting an interactive session and panel event, Playing the Long Game in Entrepreneurship: Scaling Beyond the Product, in Istanbul.
Together with SGlobe, we hosted founders and investors in the tech ecosystem to discuss the entrepreneurial journey, and how they can achieve long-term performance. We explored how founders can move from feeling overwhelmed and burnt out, to energized and motivated through a purpose-driven approach, building resilience, taking care of self, and having a great support system of people.
Hosted at newly opened entrepreneurship hub, The Hood Tekmer, we were delighted to get together with the community in Istanbul.
Throughout the evening, we took founders on a journey of connection, reflection, and sincere conversations on the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey. We explored how founders can drive long-term performance in the tech ecosystem and navigate the almost-daily challenges they are dealing with. We highlighted the importance of focusing on organizational health and developing leadership resilience by incorporating renewal activities into their lives.
Key takeaways from the event
Understanding our nervous system for performance & creativity: PNS vs SNS
Founders often find themselves in a constant state of stress, activating the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). This prepares the body for “fight or flight” mode, mobilizing our energy reserves for physical activity for immediate performance, to respond to emergencies and urgent issues. While short burst of stress may help us deal with a threat in the moment, long-term stress is puts our mind, body, and ultimately our business at risk.
Long-term stress causes all kinds of physical, emotional and cognitive issues. It negatively affects memory, focus, and our decision making abilities, weakens the immune system, and leads to mood disorders, to name a few. As you can imagine, when we are in this state it is hard to perform long-term or be creative because our focus is so narrow and our physical energy is depleted.
In the opposite role of our SNS is the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). It promotes “rest and digest” activities, slows heart rate, increases digestion, promotes relaxation and recovery. Since it puts us in such a calm state promoting recovery and healing, it enhances sustained attention and focus, and enables us to maintain long-term steady performance.
Additionally, when this relaxed state is conducive to creative thinking, we make more neural connections, and encourages divergent thinking, allowing for idea generation and creativity.
Burnout to Renewal
BURNOUT
Long-term stress may lead to burnout, or another state where we don’t feel engaged, energized, and motivated. There are three components of burnout:
High exhaustion
High depersonalization and cynicism
Low sense of personal accomplishment
Based on the combination of these components there are 5 level of work engagement, according to the Maslach Burnout Inventory, but in our research with founders we found another common combination and added it as “Overwhelmed” right before burnout.
Engaged: Highly involved, energetic, highly motivated, driving innovation and growth.
Ineffective: Experiencing a lack of accomplishment and feeling unproductive despite efforts.
Overextended: Feeling overwhelmed by the relentless demands and the fast pace.
Disengaged: Losing connection and enthusiasm for their vision for the company and daily operations.
Overwhelmed: Feeling highly exhausted and detached, yet still maintaining a strong sense self-belief.
Burnout: Experiencing extreme fatigue, detachment, and a significant decline in motivation.
So, how do we deal with long-term stress and avoid burnout?
“We can’t reduce stress by working on stress but we can work on renewal.”
- Richard Boyatzis
RENEWAL
To move away from feeling overwhelmed and start feeling hopeful again, we incorporate renewal activities. They help us recover from stress, re-energize, and maintain a positive and productive state of mind. Although they are very simple things like mindfulness & meditation, exercise, sleep, social connections, hobbies, nature and outdoor activities, acts of kindness and gratitude, and reflective practices, they can enhance emotional intelligence, resilience, and overall performance.
For more information about burnout and the levels of work engagement, check out our full article on the topic over on our Substack.
Playing the Long Game: Leadership Resilience & Smart + Healthy Organizational
Entrepreneurship is a long journey.
So how can we be ‘successful’ on this path both as an individual and as a company without depleting yourself, your resources, and relationships?
We have a simple framework that attributes it to two things: leadership resilience and building smart and healthy organizations.
Leadership Resilience
We break down leadership resilience into 4 components that are made of skills and mindsets that can be developed for founders to evolve into their new roles as leaders that inspire and empower people rather than being hands-on individual contributers.
Self: understanding, developing, and honoring yourself, your vision and values
Attention: your focus, energy, and most limited and valuable resource to give
People: your support network and relationships with partners, team, and all stakeholders
Outlook: a growth and beginner’s mindset, hope, positive attitude, resilience
This framework helps us identify areas for growth, so we can build and grow resilience as leaders and founders, and start to truly thrive. Underpinning each of these components is curiosity and trust.
Smart + Healthy Organizations
A smart organization pursues rapid growth, and focuses intensely on metrics, goals, funding, and strategy. This is the part that most startups get right, as they are easily quantifiable and measurable giving lots of data to benchmark 'success.' Where many startups – and organizations overall – tend to trip up is when it comes to making their smart organization also healthy.
Organizational health is not luxury, but rather simple, necessary, daily behaviors, approach and practices. Healthy organizations experience minimum politics, minimum confusion, high morale, high performance, and very low turnover. By focusing on building both smart and healthy organizations, founders can build a businesses that unlock long-term performance and competitive advantage.
In a healthy organization, leaders have 3 main responsibilities:
Establish, communicate and rally people around a shared vision and strategy,
Create a learning environment that fosters innovation, and
Lead the team on execution with clarity, alignment and motivation.
Panel on Playing the Long Game
We wanted to offer different perspectives on our panel session, and were delighted to have Bulut Arukel (serial entrepreneur and Cofounder of Figopara) and Pelin Gonul Sahin (Founder of Founder Being to help enhance mental wellbeing and Venture Partner at 212 VC) join us.
We got great feedback from the founders in the audience who massively appreciated Bulut’s candor during the fireside chat. Bulut shared his experience and insights on the ups and downs of his entrepreneurial journey, building and exiting several business and now as cofounder of a leading fintech business at Series-A stage.
Some takeaways from the panel:
Healthy cofounder relationships are key to going through the highs and lows of building a startup. It must be built on mutual trust and honesty that drives healthy conflict.
Especially as the company grows there might be a new bigger problem every day and it gets stressful. You have to have your own practices and a strong support system to bounc back from these.
To create and run equitable organization, it’s necessary to foster a culture of taking care of one another at every level from day one and put systems in place to create value for every member of the organization from the shareholders to the lady who prepares tea for the team (a super important person in Turkish organizations, keeping the pulse of the company)
The significance of building and maintaining a strong support system of mentors, advisors, and coaches who believe in you, guide you and support you on this path filled with uncertainty.
Importance of founder mental health and the benefits of therapy on our individual journeys.
Special Thanks to Our Co-Hosts
SGlobe
Acting as a growth partner to scale up startups, SGlobe provides a 360 degree startup ecosystem to support to develop organizations with everything they need, under a single roof; from accounting to legal, from globalization to investment processes.
The Hood TEKMER
A growth hub for entrepreneurs, the this remarkable space opened its doors this May to the startup ecosystem and already hosts 17 startups!
They host the journey of entrepreneurs, institutions, and investors coming together to create a positive impact on the ecosystem, with a focus on globalization, innovation, and development. Located at the heart of startup ecosystem, Maslak 42 in Istanbul, The Hood is the meeting point of the world, and the perfect place to grow new ventures.
