Over 10 years of being someone's worker, leaders that own those characters demonstrate worse track records in company performance than leaders that don't have those characteristics.
1/ Speculating on stocks or futures
A leader should spend all their time creating and engineering a better future. Speculating on markets outside their expertise should be a waste of time if they really know what they are doing.
Even lower confidence if I peeked at their portfolio and notice them losing trades on speculative assets. Is that the reason why my boss urgently needs money and productivity?
There are some exceptions, where a great investor is also doing the hands-on work of running a company. 1
2/ Threatens misbehaving employees with pay cut and termination
If an employee is a problem and you can do without them, terminate. Don't need to threaten.
If you must threaten, intimidation is a poor strategy to motivate someone who is underperforming or misbehaving -- a leader that makes a poor strategy is a poor leader.
What happens when you threaten is resentment and people preparing to jump ship as soon as they find the opportunity. Bad retention strategy.
Roll for persuasion, not intimidation.
3/ Not respectful of other people's time
By showing up late, or keeping people overtime on projects or meetings.
Usually, this behavior is confounded with regular poor business judgment.
They tend to have budget issues and lack of manpower issues, but I hypothesize the true cause is that they cannot properly allocate priorities.
4/ Underpays or too much cost-cutting
You don't build a sports team that wins by buying players at wholesale prices. Lots of people do it, but I haven't seen one that works.
If someone really had a good solution to your problem, you pay as much as you can to get it.
Underpaying and cost-cutting is also a behavior that's confounded with priority issues similar to (3).
Underpaying, while it works against workers who are desperate enough to put up with those conditions, also has the effect of hiding the real costs of the problem.
Leaders will take for granted that this is all the investment that needs to get things done (at unsustainable prices) and think they have margins to pursue even worse market ideas.
You don't win from someone's losses by lowballing. You also lose out on real information that would have stopped you from pursuing bad ideas.
5/ Bad offers
The best signal starts from a good offer. A shitty offer either means the founder:
- didn't do his market research
- sucks at marketing 2
- cares more about himself than you or the mission
- thinks he can get away with cutting corners and regularly practices it
- rather wins the battle and loses the war
In 10 years of my working life, I have never seen a founder making bad offers to not have any of these problems. 3
Footnotes
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In rare cases, I met leaders who are great investors and they are great people to work with as they understand macro, accounting, and good business models. I hold suspicion to leaders who are responsible for a large part of the company and its workers future, but somehow find time for short-term derivatives and engage with trading systems they cannot explain. ↩
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If he sucks at selling the role to you, he will suck at selling the product to the market. ↩
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That said, its important not to feel entitled to what offer he should have. Being a founder is tough. There are many cases where I offer my partners more than what I would get and still get laughed off (rationally or irrationally). I just treat it as me not capable enough and take it as a signal to go back working on the small things well before going after the bigger things again. ↩