The Startup Board’s Hippocratic Oath

The Hippocratic Oath is a well known oath of ethics taken by physicians. It requires them to swear, among other things, to do no harm in dealing with patients. While chatting with a VC the other day, it occurred to me that we should have a similar concept for startup boards.

Unfortunately, I think “do no harm” actually sets too high a bar.

To help startups succeed, boards need to challenge leadership teams, ask hard questions, and get them to consider new ideas and approaches. While I think boards should refrain from giving directive feedback, there is always the chance that a hard question leads the company down a path that ultimately proves unproductive. For example, if a board member asks if a company to consider a PLG motion for a new product, that could lead to the company launching a new sales motion that ultimately fails.

This example, by the way, shows both why boards should not give directive feedback (i.e., “do a PLG motion”) and why founders should not listen to them when they do. Think: yes, we’ll consider that, but only try it if we think it’s a good idea. Throwing a bone to board members by agreeing to try ideas you don’t believe in is a losing strategy. If they fail, you are more likely to get scorn for poor execution than credit for the openness in having tried. When results are the only thing that matter, only place your bets on things you think will deliver results. (And yes, the possibility that you threw good execution at a bad idea seems conveniently never to be in consideration.)

If “do no harm” sets too high a bar, then what oath might we use? After talking to my friend, I think I found a great alternative: do no demotivation. “I don’t want executive teams leaving board meetings feeling demotivated,” he said. And he was absolutely correct.

How do we want people to feel at the end of a board meeting?

• We want the board to feel like they attended a well-run meeting, had a chance to help the company, and understand the plan to address current challenges going forward
• We want the management team to feel like the board is knowledgeable, helpful, and supportive
• And we want the management team to feel energized to go execute the plan

That’s it. If you get those three things, you had a successful board meeting. And demotivation is nowhere on that list. Demotivation doesn’t help anyone.

• It doesn’t improve the odds of executing the plan successfully
• It definitionally doesn’t make anyone feel good
• It does make the e-staff start to question the CEO and each other
• It does make people wonder why they’re grinding so hard
• It does make the team feel unappreciated and potentially vulnerable

So I’d propose Do No Demotivation as the Hippocratic Oath for startup boards.

I’ll finish this post by listing some common ways that boards demotivate executive teams (and feel free to put more examples of your own in the comments):

• Expressing surprise over things they should have known.
• Asking trap questions: “do you think our sales productivity is substandard or very substandard?”
• Placing blame: “clearly, since our CAC payback is so long, we have an inefficient sales organization.” (Maybe we do. Or maybe we have a hard-to-sell product. Or weak gross margins. Or something else. The high CPP is a fact. The reason for it is not always a bad sales team.)
• Cherry-picking: taking top decile benchmarks, or public comps, or even just top quartile numbers but across 4 different metrics. It’s like comparing your child to the best mathematician, athlete, musician, and writer in the school. (It’s quite rare when one person is all those things.) Or, my favorite: benchmarking without regard for situation. Yes, our CAC ratio is high, but 75% of our deals are dogfights against a price-slashing competitor. And yes, I know what “sell value” means, thanks.
• Expressing anger in pretty much any form. While I’ve seen some howlers, fights in board meetings are not OK. They demotivate everyone. And they take focus off the top busness priorities.
• Ratholing, failing to take things to an offline meeting or working group. OK, I do this one from time to time. (“But I promise it will be quick.”)
• Making easy things hard. When in doubt, if a topic is not strategic, just do things the standard way at the good-enough level.
• Expressing negative or hopeless sentiments: “at this course and speed, I’m not sure we’re creating any value.” As opposed to: “we need a new plan that creates value and that means we need to find a way to accelerate growth.”

So before you attend your next board meeting remind yourself to do no demotivation. It’s the new Hippocratic Oath of startup boards.