Why Relationship Intelligence Matters for Startups

You’ve got a great business idea, you’ve taken the plunge and launched your startup. Now the hard work really starts – the work of building relationships with many different types of people. If you fail to do this, your startup will fail. You’ll have to adapt and flex your approach as you pivot from one situation to another, and that takes a lot of energy and relationship intelligence too.

I wrote How to Get On with Anyone: Even the Difficult Ones to share tips and tools for connecting and collaborating with other people and getting good outcomes for everyone. It’s a guide to relationship intelligence.

Why do startup founders and entrepreneurs need to prioritise relationship-building?

As a founder, you interact with many different people who can help you build your business – investors, employees, customers, clients, interns, suppliers, financial and legal advisors, and lots more. You’ll have to communicate your vision for your business and keep everyone aligned – that’s not easy when you are juggling so much.

As well as keeping in touch with externals, you’ll need to keep your team engaged and motivated and pulling in the same direction. It’s easy for a team to lose focus when the founder is away networking and looking for opportunities. You need to have a good relationship with them so that they trust you and you trust them, and so you can pick up on any tensions before they escalate into conflict.

What are the most common personality clashes in fast-growing teams?

Personality clashes happen in all teams some of the time. But there are extra pressures in startups – the fast pace, constant change, new people, unclear processes – that make them more likely. When we are under these pressures, we don’t take time to talk and appreciate each other’s perspectives.

A typical clash occurs when some people want to make quick decisions and get things done fast (I call these Mobilisers) while others want to make more considered decisions and take time to plan (Navigators). These people often have conflict – the Mobilisers get frustrated and feel held back, and the Navigators feel pressured to act before they are ready.

Another clash occurs between people who are more extraverted and ones who are more introverted. The more extraverted people tend to speak first in meetings and think while they are speaking. More introverted people like to think first before they speak and wait for a pause before they join in. Each group can find the other group’s behaviour annoying – the extraverts can seem domineering, and the introverts can seem disengaged. These differences make it difficult to work together effectively.

Your book is called How to Get On With Anyone — what’s the core idea behind it?

The book is about the four styles that we tend to fall into when we interact with others, and their positive and negative impacts. While we have a natural style, we can change our behaviour depending on the situation. Knowing about these styles and your own natural style means you can manage your impact on others and make conscious choices about how to behave. And if you can pick up cues from other people about what might be driving their behaviour, you can adapt what you do and say to build rapport and connection with them.

Ultimately, it’s about being able to flex how you interact with other people so that you get the best outcomes for everyone.

How can understanding personality styles help entrepreneurs lead better?

Firstly, knowing your own style is incredibly important. As a leader everything you say and do will have an impact on the people around you. So you have to be aware of your behaviour and whether it’s having the impact you want. I mentioned Mobilisers earlier. When they communicate with others, their drive for getting results comes across positively as being straightforward and determined. But if they get frustrated when other people want more discussion, they can come across negatively as impatient or demanding and then they don’t get the co-operation they need. Each style has potential pitfalls and if you are aware of them, you can consciously choose to adapt your behaviour.

Secondly, understanding other people’s styles helps you lead them in a way that gets the best out of them. I once coached a senior manager who had decided that one of his team members was not performing well because he didn’t say much in meetings. The team member had a more introverted style (the Synthesiser style) and found it difficult to summarise and express his thoughts in the group. When the manager understood the personality difference between them, he’d get the person’s inputs outside the meetings, and they both got real benefits from this – it wasn’t a performance problem, it was just a different style of communication.

You can give people opportunities that play into the talents of their style. If you have someone who likes to involve others and collaborate (typical of the Energiser style), you can give them projects that draw on these strengths. Or if you have someone who likes to pull lots of information and input together to get the best result, (typical of the Synthesiser style), again you can give them opportunities to use these talents.

What should founders be aware of in how they come across to others?

There is so much! Founders have to build relationships with so many different people – it’s almost as if they need to be a chameleon and switch between personas depending on who they are interacting with. Everyone you communicate with has different perspectives and concerns and you have to be able to tap into those. For example, you’ll communicate differently, in both style and content, to a group of mainly male potential investors, from how you’d communicate with potential customers. And then your follow up messaging with each of them will be different too.

The most important thing to think about is: what is the outcome you want from the interaction, and therefore, what will you say and how should you say it, that will best achieve that outcome. You need to consider what the audience wants from you, and their personality styles.

Are there simple things founders can do today to build rapport and trust?

Definitely! There are lots of simple things you can do. There are obvious things to build rapport like making eye contact, smiling, making small talk, asking questions, listening. Getting to know people on a personal level develops trust. Find out what they’ve been doing outside work and about their families and interests. Share something about yourself, not only your thoughts but also how you are feeling – this builds trust. Take the risk of being honest about mistakes and what you have done to put them right. Find something to laugh about – work should be fun!

How can teams improve communication in hybrid or remote work environments?

I strongly believe that teams need to meet face to face some of the time, so maybe have one day a week when everyone has to be in the office, or in some other venue if you don’t have your own office yet. And create opportunities for them to get to know each other personally too, not just their work selves. This is important for startups when you have new people joining regularly and need to integrate people.

When they are working remotely, you can build relationships by starting meetings early so there is time to chat, or scheduling regular catch-up sessions.

Then there are things you can do to get people participating in your online meetings. The danger with online is that people check out, it’s hard to keep their active participation, they get distracted and are tempted to multi-task, so find ways to keep their attention. Anything you can do to involve people in speaking, typing, moving, participating, really helps.

Personality differences come in here too – as I said earlier, you may need to manage the contributions of more extraverted people, so they don’t dominate, and find ways to get more introverted people to express their thoughts. You could send out the topics for discussion and any pre-reading in advance, have silent brainstorming before a discussion, ask everyone in turn to comment.

Online communication is tiring, so make sure you use the time productively and don’t let meetings drag on. I think 45 minutes is the maximum time for an online meeting.

Where can readers learn more about your work?

I am on LinkedIn and YouTube, and my website has lots of free resources. I’ve published two books, How to Get On with Anyone: Even the Difficult Ones, (Pearson 2nd edition 2024), and Motivation: The Ultimate Guide to Leading Your Team, (Routledge 2023) with lots of practical advice, tips and templates for being a better communicator. They are in all good bookshops and on Amazon too.

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