Once your business evolves from its startup phase and into a functioning company, you’re going to be relying more and more on your leadership skills to keep the ship moving in the right direction. Leadership is a tough gig, but fortunately there is one group of people who have demonstrated the requisite skills time and again: Supervillains!
1. Demonstrate your ability to diversify.
It’s great to be really good at something — in fact, that’s probably what got you where you are today. But if you want to continue being successful, you’ll need to be prepared to understand and be able to contribute to other fields. You’ll be hiring a staff with various diverse skill sets, and you need to understand every one of them.
Take Doctor Octopus, for example: Despite having a background in nuclear physics and academia, he quickly learned to branch out into such disparate areas as bank robbery, kidnapping and murder. It’s a truly inspirational story!
2. Make sure everyone understands your HR policies.
With increasingly blurred lines between that startup environment and the more professional company your business is on your way to becoming, it can be hard for employees to know exactly where they stand on simple office etiquette. With businesses generally adopting a more informal workplace, it’s more important than ever that you — and your HR department — make everyone aware both of what you expect from them, and the fair, impartial way you enforce those rules.
This is a feature of employment that Two Face’s staff have always respected, with a clear-cut, well-defined decision-making process in place to decide how a transgression should be handled. A coin flip might not be the best way for everyone to decide whether to forgive an employee or shoot them in the face with a .22 caliber pistol, but it’s admirably effective in its simplicity.
3. Keep thinking big.
Everyone started small at some point — even Apple began life in a garage (sort of). Don’t let the modest scale of your current enterprise deter from you from the end game, or your staff won’t feel like sticking around for the ride.
Look at Oswald Cobblepot, better known as the Penguin: Did he let his relatively low-key position as leader of a band of circus-themed sewer thugs stop him from being a serious candidate for mayor of Gotham City? No, he did not. This is a lesson you can see being applied even today, as Donald Trump whips up his own…