Ask HN: Has anyone gotten into management coaching for startups?

5 points by stocktech 4 years ago | 1 comment

I've been doing interviews with Series B-D startups and one issue that seems to recur is a lack of management experience. Generally, an engineer gets promoted to some level of management, but never learns how to manage. Hard conversations aren't happening, feedback isn't constructive, and the people aspect is left to fend for itself. That's all on top of standard organization challenges like team structure.

Generally, I'd expect the CTO/VP/Director to have more management experience, but in a lot of these cases, they may have the resume, but not the skills.

Has anyone had a career from selling management coaching or consulting on these issues?

greenyoda 4 years ago |

It's not just a problem in startups. Even in larger, established companies, people get promoted into management all the time without having had any leadership experience, training or support. (It happened to me.)

In a startup, you don't even need to get promoted into management. A founder who has hardly any experience as an employee, let alone as a manager, can just declare themselves to be the CEO or CTO. I suspect that such lack of leadership experience among founders contributes to the failure of many startups, once they get to the point of scaling up and hiring employees.