Startup Lesson #1 - Leave Your (Trust) Issues at the Door
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I don’t have trust issues, honestly. After all, I have a blog, where I write about my personal life all the time, and it gets delivered to nearly 400 people instantly. And I will tell almost anyone anything about myself, if they ask.
But the thing about working in a corporate setting is no one asks you how you are feeling every day and expects an honest answer. Nobody knows about what you do outside of work, and no one really needs to, as long as you are basically getting your job done.
I don’t talk to people about what’s going on with me that often. It’s not because I don’t want them to know, but because I assume they don’t want to know every little detail of my life. Now that I work at a small company, however, I’m realizing that there’s no way I can continue this passive approach to balancing my personal and professional lives. With so few people in the company, everyone is very dependent on each other to get things done. You must be good at your own job, yet also be able to step in and help others when needed.
So I’m learning, slowly, how to adjust to my new “family” life. Because, really, a startup runs a lot like a family is run, in that you spend a lot of time together and about half of that is spent trying not to kill each other. But more importantly, a family is a unit, and every person in the family must pull his or her weight in order for the family to survive. This requires, above all, trust.
I don’t mean trust like getting your job done on time. I mean trust like giving someone the password to your gmail account. Like telling someone about your mental disorder. Like letting someone see you without makeup, in the metaphoric sense.
Startups can feel intense, but I think this feeling boils down to the accelerated pace in which you must build an intense trust in other people. It’s scary, but exhilarating - similar to how falling in love might be if it happened in a week’s time span.
So if you want to work at a startup, be prepared for a crash course in getting to know other people and letting them know you. And unlike most workplaces where you are expected to leave your issues at the door, expect instead to leave your trust issues at the door.
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Monica O'Brien is the founder of Twenty Set, a website about personal and professional growth and development for the Millennial generation. She has been a blogger since 1998 when blogging was still in its “Dear Diary” form and in May 2007 began blogging for personal branding and profit.
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do you know any information about this subject in other languages?
Jun 4th, 2008 at 6:06 am
[…] offices, and as we grew, we upgraded to larger digs with more people crammed two to an office. At a start-up, everyone pretty much knows everything about each other’s lives. It’s not just the office sharing; it’s the long hours, the pent-up […]