Most startup advice is about strategy, metrics, hiring. Very little about how people feel — and yet feelings are usually what determines whether a team ships or stalls.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because I keep seeing the same pattern play out across startups I’ve worked with. And partly because of something I learned years ago in Ronald Heifetz’s class at the Kennedy School that I keep coming back to — his framework on adaptive leadership crystallized something I’d been struggling to articulate.
The Scene
Here’s a scenario that plays out constantly:
A cofounder throws out “what if we pivot to X?” in a Monday standup. To him, he’s brainstorming. He’s being transparent, thinking out loud, inviting debate. That’s what cofounders are supposed to do, right?
But the founding engineer who’s been heads-down building for six months hears something completely different. He hears: my work might be worthless. He doesn’t push back — not because he agrees, but because there’s a power dynamic he can feel but can’t quite name. The person who controls his equity just casually suggested his last six months don’t matter.
The cofounder walks away thinking “great brainstorm.” The engineer goes quiet, starts updating his LinkedIn, and ships a little slower each week. Nobody talks about why.
Neither person is wrong. But something important just broke, and neither of them has the language for it.
Why Change Is Hard (Even When It’s Right)
This is where Heifetz helped me see something I’d been missing. He draws a distinction between two kinds of problems:
Technical problems have known solutions. The server’s down — fix it. You need a CFO — hire one. These are hard but straightforward. Apply expertise, solve problem.
Adaptive challenges are different. They require people to change their beliefs, habits, or identity. Pivoting the product. Shifting from founder-led sales to a sales team. Confronting a cofounder about performance. These don’t have a playbook. They require people to let go of something — and that letting go is where everything gets stuck.
Here’s the thing most founders miss: people don’t resist change because they’re weak. They resist because change means loss.
That engineer isn’t being “sensitive.” He’s processing real losses — six months of work, his identity as the technical architect, his sense of control over the product’s direction. You can’t logic someone through that. It has to be metabolized.
Here’s what most people miss about high-growth startups: they aren’t a series of stable periods interrupted by occasional change. A high-growth startup is one long, continuous adaptive challenge. Every quarter, roles shift. The engineer who was a generalist now needs to be a manager. The cofounder who did everything now needs to delegate. The scrappy sales process needs to become a real team. The whole company needs to re-learn how it works, over and over, at a pace most people have never experienced.
That’s not a bug — that’s what growth looks like from the inside. And treating these constant adaptive challenges like technical ones — just make the rational decision and move on — is how you end up with a team that looks aligned in meetings and falls apart everywhere else.
The Thermometer You’re Not Reading
Heifetz talks about the leader’s job as managing the “productive zone of disequilibrium.” Think of it as a thermometer:
Too cold: Everyone’s comfortable. No urgency. “Things are fine” when they’re clearly not. You’re burning runway while the team optimizes things that don’t matter.
Too hot: Panic. People shut down, get political, or leave. You’ve pushed so hard and so fast that nobody can think straight.
The sweet spot: Uncomfortable but not overwhelmed. This is where growth happens — where people are stretched enough to change but supported enough to not break.
The cofounder in our story cranked the heat to maximum without realizing he was holding the dial. That’s the thing about power dynamics in startups — cofounders often don’t realize they can’t “just brainstorm” anymore. Their words carry weight they didn’t ask for and might not want. A casual “what if” from the person who signs the checks lands very differently than the same words from a peer.
Feelings Are Data, Not Noise
Startup culture fetishizes rationality. “Don’t be emotional.” “Move fast.” “Data-driven decisions.” But feelings are the data that tells you the temperature.
Anxiety in the team? You might be moving too fast or not communicating enough context. Apathy? Not enough urgency, or people don’t understand why their work matters. Conflict? Could be productive friction — or a sign you have a values problem you’re not addressing.
Ignoring feelings doesn’t make them go away. They leak out as passive aggression, quiet quitting, hallway politics, and slow-rolling decisions. The engineer in our story didn’t say “I feel threatened.” He just… disengaged. And by the time that’s visible in the metrics, it’s usually too late.
High Performance ≠ No Friction
This is where people get confused. Psychological safety — Amy Edmondson’s term — doesn’t mean everyone’s comfortable all the time. It means people feel safe enough to take risks, disagree, and say “that scares me and here’s why” without it being career suicide.
The best startup teams I’ve seen run hot. They argue, they challenge, they move fast. But they do it inside a container where people trust that the discomfort is in service of something, not just chaos.
Heifetz calls this the “holding environment” — the structure that lets people do hard work without falling apart. In practice, it’s less mystical than it sounds. It’s a cofounder who says “I want to stress-test our direction — nothing is decided, I need your honest take” before riffing on pivots. It’s separating exploring ideas from making decisions and being explicit about which one you’re doing.
That’s it. That’s the whole trick. Frame before you explore. Name which mode you’re in.
Managing the Rate of Change
Your job as a leader isn’t to eliminate discomfort — it’s to make sure your team can absorb the rate of change the business demands. And in a high-growth startup, that rate is relentless.
This means you’re not “managing through a change” like it’s a one-time event. You’re constantly calibrating: How much can this team take right now? What do they need to let go of this month? Have they processed the last shift enough to handle the next one?
Name what’s being lost. Every time a role changes, a product pivots, or a process gets replaced — something dies. Someone’s identity, someone’s work, someone’s comfort. “I know this means some of what you built won’t ship as-is.” People can handle hard news. What they can’t handle is pretending there’s no cost.
Sequence the losses. Don’t drop the pivot, the reorg, and the new OKRs in the same week. People can metabolize one hard thing at a time. Stack them and they shut down.
Decide and move. Psychological safety doesn’t mean consensus. You can acknowledge the cost and still make the hard call. In fact, that’s exactly what good leadership is — being honest about the tradeoffs and then deciding anyway. The acknowledgment is what earns you the speed.
Why Startups Get This Wrong
Founders are selected for conviction and speed — the opposite of what adaptive leadership requires. You got funded because you had a bold vision and the intensity to pursue it. Nobody invests in “I’m going to carefully regulate my team’s emotional temperature.”
VC pressure makes it worse. When you’re burning $200K a month, slowing down to acknowledge feelings seems like a luxury. But the irony is that ignoring the emotional reality is what actually slows you down — through turnover, through disengagement, through teams that nod in meetings and drag their feet everywhere else.
And “culture” gets reduced to perks and values posters instead of the actual emotional reality of how people work together. Your culture isn’t your ping pong table. It’s what happens when the cofounder throws out a pivot idea on a Monday morning.
The Point
The best founders I’ve worked with aren’t the ones who move fastest. They’re the ones who know when to turn up the heat and when to let the room cool down. They understand that every strategic change has a human cost, and that pretending otherwise doesn’t make them tough — it makes them blind.
Leadership isn’t having the vision. It’s having the courage to sit in the discomfort with your team while you figure it out together. And sometimes, it’s as simple as saying: “I know this is hard. Here’s why we’re doing it anyway. Tell me what you’re worried about.”
That’s not soft. That’s how you build a team that can actually survive the thing you’re building together.