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Key Takeaways Empathy without accountability is not a sign of a good leader. It’s akin to business sabotage.
Tolerating “non-performers” is an injustice to clients and customers.
The founder sets the culture. A company is defined by the standards you are willing to enforce.
Before starting UKHI, I was running a digital marketing agency. It was a small team of young people. It was a vibrant team. We had passion. We had tasted some success and had the hunger for more. Though things looked functional on the surface, we had clients and were getting organic leads. But inside, things were stalling.
Our client base was pretty large, but “well-paying clients” were limited. I was desperately trying to pivot to mobile application development, as it was an “in” thing. Had we succeeded, it would have ended many of our financial woes. The company would have taken a different trajectory altogether.
My thinking was in the right direction. However, things did not go the way I had expected. Instead of being a leader who makes hard, objective decisions, I acted like a peer who didn’t want to hurt feelings. The reason was that I was trying to be a “nice” leader.
Whenever I lost projects because of buggy code, missed deadlines or other issues, my immaturity became a real bottleneck. I knew the quality was the issue — clients were complaining about UI/UX and performance — but I failed to hold people accountable.
I tolerated their poor performance. I kept giving them one lifeline after another in the futile hope that it would eventually pay off. It took years of failing projects and financial bleeding to realize that the mediocrity wasn’t coming from my team; it was being permitted by me.
This is what falling into the “empathy” trap taught me.
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