Leadership & Culture - Lessons from Guadalajara, Mexico
Last week, we learned lessons on leadership, culture and talent development at BlueRun Ventures’ (BRV) founder summit in Guadalajara (GDL), Mexico. Lying at the center of the country, GDL is known for its cultural wealth, political significance (it’s where Miguel Hidalgo y Costila initiated the Mexican independence movement and decreed the abolition of slavery in 1810) and excellence in research and technology.
Unlike most other business functions, talent gets harder and more expensive to develop and maintain as companies scale. For years, large corporations and startups alike, including some of BRV’s portfolio companies, have developed programming and R&D teams in GDL considering the caliber of talent, convenience of time zones, ease of securing work visas, quality of life and cost relative to major cities in the US.
We wanted to introduce our portfolio CEOs and CTOs to the strong technical and entrepreneurial ecosystem in GDL as they think about scaling their teams and businesses. We hosted a variety of hands-on sessions on leadership, story telling, culture building, managing remote teams and more.
Below are a few takeaways from those sessions:
Lead based on strengths.
We all have ways of approaching challenges that increase our mental energy vs deplete it. Leading based on strengths means matching people to problems where their natural strengths and interests are needed to build the solutions. Thinking Talents is a helpful exercise if you’re not sure where your natural strengths lie.
Hire for differences.
In lieu of 1, hiring for different skill sets and personalities can lead to a strong, interdependent team, where each person’s (different) talents bolster and are bolstered by the other team members. Audre Lorde, one of my favorite political theorists, says it best in her essay, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House”:
“Interdependency between [people] is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative...Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”
The burden of leadership is knowing what to share with whom and when.
Term sheets get pulled unexpectedly, customer contracts fall through, cash runs out, partnerships implode, etc. There’s no rulebook for how and when to communicate these issues to the team. The best thing you can do is act with integrity and figure out the “best” level of communication and style of motivation for each team member and department.
Heed the cultural forces of your team to influence it.
In the words of Barry Katz, companies are cultural constellations composed of individual employee cultures (their backgrounds and personalities), company cultures (startup vs corporate, private vs public, for profit vs not for profit, geographic locations etc), and functional cultures (sales/marketing, HR, engineering, operations and so on). Find the thread that connects these cultures together - our founders often cited humor - and context switch based on who you are talking to.
Play the long game.
The world is a small place and building lasting relationships is invaluable. It may be a former intern who becomes the head of BD at a Fortune 10 company and leads the acquisition of your startup.
We are very grateful for the invaluable contributions made by local GDL partners and BRV friends to our summit. Major thanks to Omar Segura and Julia Davalos of the co-work space Mutuo, Tony Rallo with Saas- focused angel syndicate ID345, Roman Leal of LEAP Global Partners, and Ileana Jaime of Endeavor GDL for introducing us to the community. Also many thanks to At Your Core Leadership coaching, Di-Ann Eisnor, Barry Katz, and Vipul Ved Prakas for facilitating our sessions.
For those of you going to GDL, I highly recommend:
Pitaya food tours - Paul is a fantastic tour guide!
Huseo - phenomenal food with great art and ambiance
NATIVO - great fusion food
Agave Experience - Best tequila tasting experience. I’ve never met anyone as knowledgeable about tequila as Giancarlos
Allium - Adolfo, the Owner and Head Chef, has built something really special