How bad leadership culture can ruin a business

This article is an excerpt from an episode of Startup Snapshot, a Tech in Asia podcast that features the leaders and innovators in the Asian startup scene, and discusses the highs and lows of their founder journeys. It is heavily revised from the original transcript. Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts.

As the saying goes, the task of taking something from zero to one is fundamentally different from taking it from one to two. In the same way, there’s no comparing the work involved when you start a company to the experience of scaling one.

This is the challenge that Honestbee’s co-founders Joel Sng, Isaac Tay, and Jonathan Low faced. While the on-demand delivery service startup experienced rapid growth in its early days, the trio lacked the proper managerial experience to lead their growing team. This led to a lack of focus that ultimately resulted in a suspension of services, layoffs, staggering debt, and the founding team’s eventual departure.

In an exclusive interview with Startup Snapshot, Low talks about his stint at Honestbee for the first time since leaving his post, discussing the management missteps that led to bad leadership culture and how it played a role in the company’s recent troubles.

What was the working culture like at Honestbee?

If you look at the profile of the three co-founders, none of us had experience in actually leading a large company or a regional company. So the truth is that there were a lot of ways of doing things that were not right.

There was a high demand from the company to get the most out of the employees’ time. You could even say that it was borderline mentally abusive. Imagine if you go to your boss and you say, “Hey, I’d like to take some leave,” and your boss asks you, “When is that leave going to be? Why do you have to take it now? Do you really need that? Actually, don’t take leave.”

And your whereabouts would constantly be questioned. For example, at 9 p.m. they’d say, “Oh, why do you have time to do this?” But 9 p.m. is after office hours. To get to the point of actually criticizing people and saying, “Oh, you’re doing this at this hour? You’re not working?” That’s kind of crazy. It’s very, very controlling and that permeated the company.

The other thing that happened was that unrealistic expectations were always set. At some point, many people just felt like, “I know we have this goal, but we’re going to fail anyway, so we’ll just try what we can. But hey, we’re just going to fail because it’s impossible.” It created bad morale.

But there were also many managers who tried to protect their own teams. We took a lot of the brunt, and we tried to give them whatever space and room they needed.

Were you one of those managers?

On some fronts. Where I could [protect my team], I tried. But there were certain areas where it was pretty difficult as well. For example, for Habitat itself, there were many times when it was not possible for me to protect my own team. They were just vulnerable to the very difficult challenges and demands that were being made.

A lot of it was very tough, in the sense that you could see people breaking down sometimes. And you then start to question yourself, “What kind of a workplace are we creating?” I think pressures and all that are OK, but when it gets to a point where it could even be considered traumatic or abusive, then it becomes very scary.

Honestbee co-founder Jonathan Low / Photo credit: Honestbee

It became a lot of unnecessary overhead, from a management perspective, just trying to protect people. I know that Isaac would do a lot of this as well – he would do a lot of damage control. He went above and beyond to actually make sure that people were all right.

Were there any other challenges you faced as a co-founder?

What was the last straw that made you decide to leave the company?

Are you no longer associated now with anything happening at Honestbee?