How can founders improve their social skills?

Credit: Kimson Doan

Social skills are one of the most important determinants of success in life, especially for startup founders.

Y Combinator often says the number one cause of startup failure is founder conflict. Some conflict is inevitable, and if you lack the social skills to navigate those conflicts productively, your venture will fail. Social skills are also important in raising money, managing employees, selling your product and so on.

But if you want to improve your social skills, what can you do?

Once you get beyond the basics (How to Win Friends and Influence People etc.), there’s no App Academy, MOOC or graduate school for social skills.

Enter Innerspace — a non-profit from YC S15. They run a variety of workshops and courses to help founders better communicate with and lead their teams.

I recently had the opportunity to attend their most intensive offering: a four day residential workshop for startup executives, based on Stanford business school’s popular Interpersonal Dynamics course. (I’m the CEO of 80,000 Hours, also in YC S15.)

The centre of the workshop is the “T-group”. It’s hard to explain what a T-group is, but start by picturing a 14-person meeting, that lasts for 3 hours, and has no agenda, and happens three times a day.

Crazy, right?

Well, here’s why to do it. Before most of the T-groups we’d get a 15 minute talk from two facilitators on a concept in social skills, such as how to give feedback, express your emotions, or build stronger connections. Then you could use the T-group as an opportunity to practice.

One thing that makes the T-group setting unique is that people are encouraged to share their reactions and feelings right then, in the moment. This means you get something that’s absolutely vital for learning, but you normally lack: rapid feedback.

In a T-group, you can try out a new social skill, and then immediately see its effect on the group. Stretching yourself and getting rapid feedback is a core part of “deliberate practice”, which many experts believe is the fastest way to learn new skills.

I felt like a world had been revealed. I was first struck by how unpredictable everyone’s responses were. I realised I could hardly predict what even a third of the group was thinking at any moment.

Second, I had a tendency to hold back in the group, and I saw first-hand how this caused a segment to assume I wasn’t interested in them — a negative reaction that could have been easily avoided.

I certainly felt stretched. My shoulders clenched up and I had to run up the hills each afternoon break to blow off steam. (Note that there are ground rules, and some styles of T-groups have been criticised for encouraging too much openness, and I wouldn’t want to join one without good facilitators and supportive participants.)

Over the weekend, we also did a couple of exercises we could then reflect on as a group. For example, we had to decide who got to sleep in each room — a seemingly simple discussion that prompted some unexpected conflict, which was dissected in detail over the rest of the weekend. This is another way to learn: take an ordinary social interaction that would normally be skipped over, and think through what went well and what went badly.

Finally, at the end of the weekend, we prepped for an hour, then everyone gave everyone else three minutes of one-on-one feedback — making for 90 minutes of feedback in total. This was also fascinating. I can’t think of another time where I’ve had thoughtful feedback from 13 people that smart and successful, who had no prior conceptions about me, but have seen my social skills (and lack thereof) in real-time over 4 days.

Many people commented on my body language as a strength — something my team-mates have never mentioned. When it came to weaknesses, everyone agreed: share more, so people know how you’re reacting, know you’re engaged, and can connect more easily.

At the end, many of us felt almost high. It can be thrilling to open up in this way.

But did we really improve? Will it have lasting benefits?

I’m not aware of many better options for training social skills. I think the weekend is great for showing you how you come across to others, since you get so much feedback. It’s also a great opportunity to intensively practice new social skills. For instance, one CEO wanted to get more comfortable sharing negative reactions, to get better at giving feedback to his team, so he drilled that for four days.

Like most things, my guess is that it’ll only have significant lasting effects if I keep practicing and integrating the skills into my day-to-day life.

My life hasn’t totally changed, but I think I’ve noticed more occasions when I might have had a negative impact on someone socially; and I’ve noticed more opportunities to give positive feedback. To keep improving, I’ve taken to reflecting for 30 seconds on what emotional impact I might have had on people at the end of each work day. Innerspace also arranges follow-up peer groups, which I hope to join.

If you’d like to become a better manager or leader, it’s worth trying. Learn more here.