Building a strong leadership team is crucial for the growth of any startup, and who better to share insights than top-tier leaders like a Co-founders, CEOs and, Chief People Officers? In this Q&A, these experts reveal a wealth of knowledge with sixteen key principles to guide you. The journey begins with the importance of seeking leaders who have a startup mindset and concludes with the wisdom of hiring for values and potential. Dive in to discover these invaluable insights and more from our esteemed panel.
- Seek Leaders with Startup Mindset
- Find Collaborators with Unique Skills
- Build Trust Through Shared Experiences
- Prioritize Complementary Skills and Values
- Adapt Leadership to Business Growth
- Create a Culture of Continuous Learning
- Align on Purpose and Transparency
- Complement Strengths and Address Weaknesses
- Empower Leaders with Trust and Autonomy
- Hire Leaders with Domain Expertise
- Ensure Alignment with Shared Vision
- Adopt High Reliability Organization Principles
- Allocate Talents Effectively
- Hire Older Staff for Stability
- Embrace Diversity in Perspectives
- Hire for Values and Potential
Seek Leaders with Startup Mindset
Finding experienced leaders for a startup is tricky. Big companies can offer higher salaries and stability, so why would someone who’s “done it before” choose a startup? The answer, I believe, lies in what a startup offers that a corporation can’t: impact, ownership, and the chance to build something that truly matters. That’s what I leaned into when building our leadership team. One of our team members said it best during her interview: “You’re building something, and I want to be part of it.”
I looked for people with the right balance. They had to bring experience—leaders who’d solved big problems, built teams, or scaled businesses before—but they also needed an entrepreneurial mindset. That’s more than just experience; it’s the energy and drive to thrive in the fast-moving, unpredictable world of a startup, where not everything is perfectly laid out.
Just as important was personality. Startups are intense, and egos can sink you faster than a lack of funding. I needed leaders who were collaborative, practical, and motivated by building something bigger than themselves. During interviews, I tested for adaptability and curiosity, asking how they’d handled uncertainty or responded when their initial plans didn’t work out.
When pitching the role, I didn’t sugarcoat the challenges. Startups are tough, but for the right person, that’s the appeal. I focused on the impact they could make. They wouldn’t just manage—they’d create, shape, and leave their mark. That’s something big companies can’t always offer. Equity was part of that pitch. Even if we couldn’t match big salaries, we offered a real stake in the company and its future success.
That said, theory is always easier than reality. We’ve been lucky a few times—people have come to us who turned out to be the perfect fit. Many of them are still with us today. But there have also been struggles. In the early phases, it’s almost impossible to find leaders who check every box. I often had to weigh trade-offs between expertise, industry knowledge, and personality. When in doubt, I leaned toward problem-solvers with great personalities. Why? Because even if they didn’t know everything yet, they had the drive to figure it out.
And, honestly, I knew I’d be working with these people every day, often in tense situations. It made sense to hire people I wouldn’t mind hanging out with.
Carl Jacobs
Co-Founder & CEO, Apicbase
Find Collaborators with Unique Skills
Building a strong leadership team starts with finding the right collaborators—people who share your vision but bring unique perspectives and skills to the table. When we started Ruca, the goal wasn’t just to create another agency but to build a company capable of sustaining growth and innovation over the long term. That meant surrounding myself with people who believed in that mission and had the drive to see it through.
My co-founders, Tobi DeVito and Nolan Cabeje, and I each brought something distinct to the table: Tobi’s strategic insight, Nolan’s creative genius, and my focus on technology and scalability. By aligning on our principle of “built to build”—creating not only for clients but for ourselves—we were able to channel those diverse strengths into a cohesive team dynamic. That diversity and alignment have been critical in not just growing Ruca but in launching products like Yorba, which reflects our shared passion for improving digital relationships.
The takeaway is simple: surround yourself with like-minded people who complement your skills and inspire you to think bigger. No one achieves great things alone, and the right team can make all the difference
Chris Zeunstrom
Founder, CEO, Ruca
Build Trust Through Shared Experiences
One key principle that we’ve followed in setting up our leadership teams has been trust building—a constant in the various leadership models that exist today. This includes both an emphasis on trusting people based on what they say and do, as well as seeking to understand who people are at their core beyond what we can see and hear directly. We have engaged in many extended leadership meetings where we have a regular agenda that covers the strategic topics that are important for driving our company forward, but more importantly, we have invested the time in building connections and relationships outside of the workplace to enable understanding of one another and why we make the choices that we do.
Beyond sharing meals together—and don’t underestimate the power of food in forging bonds!—we have participated in activities like cooking classes and axe throwing as a way of establishing casual forums for bringing our whole selves into group engagements. This has, in turn, created the space for us to share about our families, holiday plans, and past experiences, among other things, which ultimately helps us to process and learn about why we operate the way that we do in our daily discussions. We’ve seen that our ability to positively connect and build trust with one another has a direct correlation with our ability to execute and deliver on the outcomes that we share responsibility for achieving.
Mike Kohn
Chief People Officer, Kevel
Prioritize Complementary Skills and Values
Building a business from scratch is an interesting journey. When I started my company, a healthcare software development company, the most difficult task was to form a leadership team. My aim was to bring in leaders who are not just experts in their domains but also align with our mission of improving healthcare systems with innovative technologies.
In the course of forming a strong leadership team, the one principle that I religiously followed was to prioritize complementary skills and values. As a business owner, technical skills, domain and process knowledge are crucial but I strongly emphasized on leaders who embraced our company’s culture of innovation, collaboration and resilience. With such a diversified skill set and perspectives, our leaders brought depth to problem-solving and decision making aspects.
For instance, when hiring our CTO and COO, I thought of hiring individuals with contrasting strengths. While I looked for the CTO with a bold vision for innovation and emerging technologies, I wanted the COO with a disciplined approach to operational execution. This helped me create a perfect balance that fuelled sustainable growth.
Riken Shah
Founder & CEO, OSP Labs
Adapt Leadership to Business Growth
My own experiences, combined with the work I do with thousands of leaders globally, has taught me one very important lesson. Each phase of your business growth requires different leadership. You can take this figuratively and consider it a change of attitude, but the reality is that often the actual leaders need changing—because your business needs will change faster than your leaders can change their habits.
For many of us the prospect of deliberately spilling roles and losing loyal people is something we try to avoid. The middle ground? Build your leadership team on adaptability and learning orientation; their expertise should be table-stakes—their ability to change and to stay ahead is what is valuable. If your leaders are learning faster than the business is growing, then they will be ahead of the startup rather than behind it. If they’re not, you will need to change them out—and be okay with that.
Rebecca Houghton
CEO, BoldHR
Create a Culture of Continuous Learning
The key principle for building a strong leadership team was creating a culture of continuous learning. We encouraged our leaders to be experts in injury law and stay current with related fields such as healthcare and insurance regulations. This broad knowledge base allows them to comprehensively support our clients and our firm’s growth. The impact was clear when we navigated a complex case involving new medical legislation, where our preparedness and comprehensive approach led to a favorable outcome for our client and strengthened our firm’s market position.
David E. Preszler
Partner, Preszler Injury Lawyers
Align on Purpose and Transparency
Building a strong leadership team started with alignment over individual brilliance. For our startup’s growth, cultural alignment was non-negotiable. Skills are essential, but shared values and a unified vision define the difference between temporary success and sustainable growth.
One key principle that drove this approach was clarity of purpose. Every leader joined with a deep understanding of our mission and their role in achieving it. Once we understand our purpose, we support it with radical transparency. This approach ensures that every leader has full visibility into the company’s goals, challenges, and progress. Transparency enables leaders to make decisions with the bigger picture in mind, build trust, and communicate authentically with their teams.
Prioritizing purpose, cultural fit, and transparency creates a leadership team that’s resilient, adaptable, and fully invested in long-term success.
Chris Dyer
Keynote Speaker On Culture, Leadership Speaker
Complement Strengths and Address Weaknesses
In my experience building startups and coaching entrepreneurs and boards, assembling a strong leadership team early on is critical for driving growth. One key principle I follow is to build a team that complements your strengths, addresses your weaknesses, and aligns with the needs of your business at its current stage. Start by mapping out the skills and expertise your startup requires and evaluating how your own capabilities fit into this picture.
Equally important is understanding what you enjoy and excel at versus what you’d prefer to delegate, as well as identifying the types of personalities you collaborate well with. As you make key hires, focus on filling gaps in both operational skills and team dynamics to create a cohesive, effective unit. A strong leadership team works as a unified whole, balancing individual strengths to support the startup’s vision and growth trajectory.
Analiza Quiroz Wolf
Executive Coach, CEO, Women of Color Rise
Empower Leaders with Trust and Autonomy
Building my leadership team, I focused on aligning values. I looked for people who shared my vision but brought diverse skills and perspectives. One key principle I followed was empowering them with trust and autonomy. I encouraged open communication and invested in their growth through mentorship and resources. This created a team that’s not only capable but fully committed to driving the startup forward. Another key point is building a leadership team with people who can relate with others from all backgrounds, this is really key for me.
Alison Lancaster
CEO, Pressat
Hire Leaders with Domain Expertise
For me, building a strong leadership team is highly dependent on a company’s vision. The key principle that I follow is that the leader who manages one of our departments should have domain expertise. But they should also demonstrate a growth mindset and the ability to thrive in unstructured situations. It’s especially important in such a fast-evolving tech environment where we operate.
While gathering my team of leaders, I was considering those who can wear multiple hats. This doesn’t mean multitasking and doing everything in one go. The idea is more about embracing ambiguity and being adaptable to the flexibility of the market. Besides, I stick to fostering the culture of open feedback and empowering leaders to own their decisions. This way, they are not just executors but co-creators of our growth journey.
Ann Kuss
CEO, Outstaff Your Team
Ensure Alignment with Shared Vision
A strong leadership team is built on a foundation of shared vision. By clearly articulating where we were headed and why it mattered, I ensured alignment across the team. This vision inspired accountability, fostered collaboration, and empowered each leader to contribute to the startup’s growth with purpose and focus.
Steven Rosen
Executive Coach, STAR Results
Adopt High Reliability Organization Principles
Startup companies challenged by combined low resources and high stakes can glean team-building priorities from industries leveraging the HRO (High Reliability Organization) principles first researched via nuclear power plants and air traffic control. The HRO principles developed from these high stakes industries are now notably prioritized in many other industries such as transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, humanitarian aid, military and agriculture.
The five HRO elements include:
- Fixation on failure
- Not quickly simplifying the complex
- Operational sensitivity
- Persistent resilience pursuit
- Empowering front-line expertise
More recent research identified one foundational premise supporting all five HRO elements. This principle, first proposed by Weick and Sutcliffe (2001) is called collective mindfulness. A leadership team with collective mindfulness behaves and decides with shared awareness, shared responsibility and shared ownership. This pursuit hinges on a leadership’s team willingness to share resources, collaborate, and actively participate in ongoing communication. Many specific strategies such as structured reflection, relational co-leadership, and relentless pursuit of psychological safety can be connected to collective mindfulness.
Beware of leaders whose approach is authoritarian, centralizes decisions, micromanaging, overconfident, reactive and committed to leader hierarchy. These dynamics will not support collective mindfulness or the numerous outcomes such as improved decision-making, enhanced team trust, higher organizational performance, sustainability, reduced burnout, and healthy organization culture—all of which attracts top talent vital to moving your startup to growth and maturity.
Dr. Natalie Pickering, PhD
CEO, Founder, High Places Coaching and Consulting
Allocate Talents Effectively
Maybe the biggest part of building a strong team for your startup is not what their capabilities are but understanding how to best allocate those talents, and this is why you need to know when to hire outside contractors. Having the right talented people in place is important, but just because they have great qualities does not mean that their time should be placed on every task.
Therefore, building a great team is not only about understanding those talents, but when to implement them and when to farm them out so you are not overburdening your team with too many responsibilities. This will make sure that your team can be at the height of their effectiveness with the responsibilities you really need. By knowing when to utilize your team’s talents and when to farm them out, you can better build an effective start-up team.
Robert Applebaum
CEO & Plasitic Surgeon, ApplebaumMD.com
Hire Older Staff for Stability
Hire older staff. They have lived through it all, so stay calmer as you progress as a company. They have better connections to help get you where you want to go. After that, hire people who fill your needs, who can learn, and who want to succeed.
Keith Brooks
CEO, B2B Whisperer
Embrace Diversity in Perspectives
Building a strong leadership team is much like assembling a puzzle; each piece must fit just right to complete the picture. One key principle I clung to was diversity—not just in backgrounds and skills but in perspectives. As we transitioned from offering just pitch deck services to a comprehensive suite of solutions, it was critical to have a team that didn’t always think like I did. I remember this one hire who was determined to challenge almost every idea with a fresh perspective. Initially, it felt like a splash of cold water, but I quickly realized that these debates were forcing us to think critically and innovatively.
One of the first leaders I brought on had a financial background totally different from my own, and another had a knack for storytelling that turned ideas into compelling narratives. This blend sparked a creative chemistry that propelled our ability to strategize and execute on client needs. Another factor was ensuring everyone was on the same page about the company’s vision—we needed to move as a unit toward the same objectives, so we regularly synced up to keep our compass focused.
I also made it a habit to foster an environment where open communication was encouraged. This wasn’t just about voicing opinions but genuinely listening to them—a little humor also went a long way in balancing serious discussions. It became almost like a family setting, where everyone’s driven passion blended seamlessly with professional respect. The sum of diverse talents, aligned vision, and a culture of open dialogue became the sturdy framework supporting our growth.
Niclas Schlopsna
Managing Consultant and CEO, spectup
Hire for Values and Potential
I focused on one key principle: hiring for values and potential over just experience. I believe that skills can be developed, but aligning on core values ensures long-term cohesion and shared purpose. I made it a priority to find people who not only could lead but also shared my vision for the business and demonstrated a growth mindset. This created a culture of trust and adaptability, which was critical as we navigated the challenges of scaling.
Evan Tzivanakis
L&D Director, EU Business School