Founder DNA

How your patterns are inherited by your team, and what you can do about it.

Mar 09, 2023

We all know that culture is king.

And we all know that leaders have a huge influence on culture.

But as a leader, would you be willing to own that every aspect of your culture—be it a strength, blindspot, or dysfunction—is a result of your own strengths, blindspots, and dysfunctional behavioral patterns?

This may seem extreme. Most leaders understandably shy away from taking that much personal responsibility for their team’s culture. But for those of you who are willing, there lies an entirely new world of possibility for you and your team.

Founder DNA

Let’s talk about Founder DNA. Some people call it Organizational Transference. Put simply, it’s when a team or organization starts to adopt a leader’s unhelpful habits and behavioral patterns.

Ryan Vaughn @RyanHVaughn

"Organizational transference": what it's called when you see the unhelpful quirks of your personality showing up in the teams you manage. It's a real thing. Want to find it for yourself? Ask yourself: "how am I responsible for creating the conditions I say I don't want?"

The term transference originally comes from psychotherapy. It describes when a patient unconsciously projects and repeats behavioral and relational patterns with their therapist. An example to demonstrate:

Imagine a patient who’s starting therapy and has an unresolved relationship with their father. They still view him as an authority to seek approval from and fear making him angry. If they begin work with an older male therapist, it’s likely they will project that same dynamic onto their therapist, viewing him as an authority to seek approval from and fearing his anger.

Given that this is counter-productive to the therapy process (the goal of which is to help this person find their internal sense of authority) a skilled therapist sees this and avoids countertransference: a phenomenon where they unconsciously fall into the other role in the relational pattern, in this case that of the external authority who gives and takes approval and whose anger is to be feared. Instead the therapist calls the dynamic out into the open so that it can be inspected. Both parties are better for it.

Unfortunately, your team and organization are not trained psychotherapists.

As a leader, you ARE projecting and repeating dysfunctional behavioral and relational patterns with your team. Here are some of the most common ways I’ve seen this play out:

Conflict avoidant leaders create conflict avoidant teams. These teams become defined by what they are unable to talk about—usually the things that are challenging and important.

As the dynamic grows, certain members of the team get sucked into the role of the “contentious one”, because this relational pattern projects and requires another to become highly contentious in an unconscious attempt to bring the team to a healthy level of conflict.
Action-biased leaders create overly action-biased teams. These teams become defined by a whirlwind of activity, usually with a sense of chaos and lack of direction.

As the dynamic grows, certain members of the team get sucked into the role of the “slow one who is holding us back”, as this relational pattern projects and requires others to slow down or freeze in an unconscious attempt to bring the team into a healthy balance of action and strategy.
Slow, fearful leaders create slow, fearful teams. These teams become permeated by a sense of malaise and a lack of progress.

As the dynamic grows, certain members of the team get sucked into the role of the one who is “wildly action biased without thinking things through” or “needs to whip the company into shape”, as this relational pattern projects and requires certain people to become wildly action-biased or tough guys in an attempt to make things happen.

Do you see the pattern? When Founder DNA is alive on a team, members of the team either:

Directly adopt the leader’s behavioral pattern
Unconsciously inhabit the opposite polarity of the leader’s tendency, often in an equally as extreme way, leading to tension and conflict

Founder DNA is the Source of Culture

Justin Mulvaney @justinmulvs

@Austen Dude, yes. I talk to founders about this all the time - I call it Founder DNA. The founder's strengths and blindspots are the blueprint for the strengths and blindspots that develop across the organizational organism.

For most teams, Founder DNA is the source of culture itself.

Team culture emerges directly from the leader’s psychological and relational patterns. When employees interact with a leader, they either adopt the leader’s patterns directly or react in opposition to them. It’s from this reality that culture is born.

This is why most attempts at defining culture fail. When transference is happening, all attempts at creating culture are superseded by it. The leadership team's psychological and relational patterns get inherited by the company at large, regardless of whatever they say they’d like the culture to be.

Why does this happen?

Humans are social creatures. We're wired for hierarchy. Millenia of hierarchical evolution tells us that if you want to survive and thrive in a hierarchy, mirror the behavior of the person at the top. Get close to them, do things that make them happy, and avoid doing things that make them unhappy.

As a result, the people lower in the hierarchy start to mirror the tendencies of those at the top.

This is usually exacerbated by hiring: if leaders view their personal tendencies as superior without understanding their contextual pros and cons, they inevitably hire people whose personalities mirror their own, blindspots and all.

The result of these two tendencies is that leaders strengths and blindspots cascade across the company. A leader with a brutal action bias and little tendency for strategic thinking builds an organization that does the same. An empathetic and thoughtful leader who shies away from conflict builds an empathetic, thoughtful, conflict-avoidant company.

When Founder DNA runs amok, organizations become dysfunctional. As a leader’s personal tendencies dominate, certain team members catch on and push back in an attempt to bring things to a healthy balance. But because this dynamic unfolds unconsciously, this pushback doesn’t serve to balance the team, but instead pisses off the leader and rest of the team. Those seeking to create balance end up in conflict with the rest of the organization, against the leader’s blindspot. It’s at this point that things get really messy.

Playing with Founder DNA

Now you know about Founder DNA. Here’s what to do about it.

I. Ownership

Here are the facts: as a leader, every dysfunction, flaw, or difficulty you see on your team comes back to you. You are creating them all, inside of you, through unfelt feelings, unexamined beliefs, and unconscious behavioral and relational patterns.

While this may feel suffocating, I’m hoping to show you that the opposite is actually true.

That’s because this means you don’t have to fix anything out in your organization. Given that you are the source of the dysfunction, all that you need to do is work on you. You need to become conscious and aware of yourself, the psychological and relational patterns that you repeat, their pros and cons, and where they come from. In doing so, you’re able to come into conscious choice around them.

All you have to do is ask yourself: how am I creating this? How does the dysfunction I see or gets reported to me live in me?

The beauty of Founder DNA is that when you transform yourself, the changes cascade out to the organization. It doesn’t have to be some big project to clean up the mess out there. Clean up the mess inside of you, and the mess out there takes care of itself.

So step one is owning what’s happening. It’s owning the fact that I have some dysfunctional, unhelpful, and unresolved things that are happening in me that are affecting my team. It’s to own that I am creating all of it.

II. Awareness

Now that you’ve owned that reality, you need to Get Aware.

Here’s another beautiful property of Founder DNA: your sources of information have multiplied. If the Founder DNA equation is:

Leader’s Function = Organizational Dysfunction

…we can take advantage of the fact that the equality is bi-directional. The leader’s dysfunction points to dysfunction that exists on the team, AND the team’s dysfunction points to dysfunction that exists in the leader. That means you needn’t only look at your dysfunction to see the team’s. You can also look at the team’s dysfunction to see your own.

So step one is to gather information. At this point you have three rich sources of information:

Your complaints about your team
Feedback on you and your leadership
Feedback on your team

Starting with your complaints about your team is usually the fastest path to awareness.

To get started, list out all of the complaints you have about your team, as well as individual people that you manage. Start with the problem you experience as being the juiciest. Play with two exercises:

Ask yourself: how is what I’m complaining about in them true about me? If you’re complaining that your team isn’t thinking strategically enough, ask yourself where and how you’re not thinking strategically.
Own your commitment to the issue and teach a class on how to recreate it. If you have a team that you judge as not thinking strategically enough, say aloud: I am committed to having a team that doesn’t think strategically. Do it five to ten times and put your emphasis on different words.

Next, teach a class on how others in your situation could recreate the problem. What would another leader need to think, do, feel, and believe (or NOT) to create a team that doesn’t think strategically?

By owning the reality that you are the source of these challenges and allowing yourself to play with them, you can get to the very source of the pattern and transform it.

For feedback on yourself, seek professional and personal feedback. Get feedback from people who have known you for a long time, and people who only met you recently. People who just met you will have a fresh perspective on their experience of you, while those who have known you a longtime will have more insight into deeply engrained patterns.

The advantage of getting feedback from people who know you primarily personally as well as professionally is that, no matter how hard you try, the dysfunction and patterns that show up in your personal life inevitably bleed into your professional. Every bit of feedback on strengths and weaknesses is pointing to something that you can work on.

Ask questions like:

What are my biggest opportunities for growth?
If I could do one thing to unlock potential in my work and life, what would it be?
Finish the sentences: You would be an even more effective leader if… I would trust you more if…
What is one specific behavioral suggestion you have for how I could be a better leader?

At this point, don’t ask yourself “Is this true about me” and “Is this showing up in the culture in unhelpful ways?” but “How is this true about me” and “How is this showing up in the culture in unhelpful ways?”. We’re not trying to be scientific here, we’re trying to improve. Assume that it is showing up in unhelpful ways and look for the evidence.

Next, get feedback from the org, on the org. Ask people on and around your team what they think your team is particularly good at and where it’s struggling. What is your team’s collective superpower? What is its achilles heel? Get inside and outside perspectives. Inside will tell you how the team experiences itself. Outside will give you novel perspectives on how others experience you.

From there, repeat the exercises above: ask yourself, how is everything that was said about my team true, and true about me specifically? Then own it as yours and teach the class like above.

III. Do your Work

The last step is simple. Do your goddamn work.

If you’ve gathered feedback, you likely already see some pathways to action.

Execute on those. Then keep going.

Keep owning your blindspots. Share what you’ve learned with others. Dig into the origin of your patterns.

If you’re overly action-biased, explore why you don’t value strategy. Play around with how the opposite might be true: how might focusing on strategy be valuable in ways that you’re not seeing? Would you be willing to see it? And would you be willing to own that it’s a weakness of yours and build systems and hire leaders who have it as strengths?

This process is more art than science, and that's okay. Oftentimes awareness of blindspots and a commitment to reconciling them is enough to get you on the right track.

As your patterns start to shift, notice the things that transform on your team. This is part of the magic of leadership. Leadership is leverage. By working on yourself, everything else improves.

Challenge

What dysfunction do you see playing out on your team? If none, get feedback from your team on the dysfunction they experience.
Own it. Ask yourself: how is it true that this dysfunction lives in me? How do I create that dysfunction out on my team? Write out the major bullet points for how another leader could recreate your problem.
Share what you’ve learned with those around you, and execute on any action items that came to mind as you did the exercise.
BONUS: Do a 360 with 10 people in your personal and professional life, asking:
1. What are my biggest opportunities for growth?
2. If I could do one thing to unlock potential in my work and life, what would it be?
3. Finish the sentences:
  1. You would be an even more effective leader if…
  2. I would trust you more if…
4. What is one specific behavioral suggestion you have for how I could be a better leader?

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Additional Resources

For a previous discussion of Founder DNA and culture: