The Most Important Skill To Have If You Work For A Startup

A little over a week ago, I wrote a post called “So You Want To Work At A Startup? Hone These 11 Soft Skills First.” The post, which has gone on to become my most successful—by a long shot—now has thousands of views, reads, and claps and I’ve had friends and old colleagues reach out about its resonance with them.

The post talks about which soft skills (or as one passionate reader put it “human skills”) you should hone if you’d like to work for a startup. As a quick recap if you haven’t read that piece, the eleven skills are:

1. Initiative

2. Resourcefulness

3. Comfort with Chaos

4. Scalability (10x)

5. Flexibility

6. Enthusiasm

7. Curiosity

8. Aspiration (#whynot)

9. Self Improvement (5% better)

10. Humor

11. Patience

I’ll link the full post below:

So You Want To Work at a Startup? Hone These 11 Soft Skills First.*“How do I get a job at a startup? What skills do they look for in an employee?”*theascent.pubBut there was one skill, above all others, that I wanted to elaborate on a bit more.

That skill is initiative.

Why Is Initiative So Important?

One of the key factors that determine a startup’s eventual success or demise is its ability to iterate faster than competitors, than the bigger companies, with fewer resources and much less manpower.

I recently stumbled upon a writer who put it much more articulately than I can:

“Initiative is the ability to be resourceful and work without always being told what to do. It requires resilience and determination. People who show initiative demonstrate they can think for themselves and take action when necessary. It means using your head, and having the drive to achieve.” — Laura-Jane Rawlings That last part, “using your head”, is absolutely crucial.

Intuition goes hand in hand with initiative. In fact, I consider them practically related.

If you’re able to intuit what a potential solution might be, you can proactively act upon it without overburdened oversight from busy superiors.

If you’re able to learn quickly, understand your guardrails, but have an innate desire to not wait for someone to tell you every single action, that is powerful and that is taking the initiative.

Intuition goes hand-in-hand with initiative. At a startup, seldom will superiors, even your direct managers, have time to hand-hold. The more you can achieve their problems and yours in the same fell swoop by taking the initiative, the higher and faster you’ll climb the ranks within the startup.

Finally, I’ll leave you with one more quote, which I think is an absolutely underrated aspect of the work environment—not just at startups, but at any company and is why many people choose not to take the initiative.

“It’s amazing how much can be accomplished if no one is concerned with who gets the credit.” — John Wooden So often we hesitate to act for fear that our actions will go unnoticed. When you take the initiative, you don’t do it for the gold stars on the report card, you do it because despite how little praise and laudation you receive, initiative should be an intrinsic reward.

You’ll know that you made something happen and that’s all that matters.