EntreStations launch in Damascus: an evening on trust and company culture

Why do tasks stay stuck with the founder?

The talk started from a number on the screen: more than three quarters of the room (77%) said they have tasks they are trying to hand over to their team, but the tasks are still stuck with them. Dr. Qawwas said the problem is not only about trust. It is also fear for the company, and not enough experience in moving from a founder who works alone to a team leader. He noted that many Syrian companies stop halfway, not because of the market, but because the founder did not learn the next step. Earlier in his talk, Ahmad Nahas had described holding on to every detail as a leftover from an old way of managing, where the business owner knows everything himself. That way no longer fits today, when work needs many different skills.

Is trust given or earned?

Hasan Fallaha said trust has more than one side: trust in a person’s skills, and trust in their honesty with money and decisions. It is built from both sides. The employee has to show what they can do, and the founder has the bigger role in finding the team’s strengths and managing them. He added that letting go of a task is not a loss. It is a gain that frees the founder for a bigger role.

A system, or adapting?

The restaurant example led to the liveliest debate. Hasan Fallaha said the most important stage for a founder is building the company so that its system runs on its own. Then the founder can leave the details and move to the next stage, as happens in a restaurant whose business model has settled. Obada Al-Lahham, a founder in the audience, disagreed. He said a young startup does not build a fixed system at first. It adapts to the market and may change its business model, and the system comes later. Fallaha closed by saying that the restaurant’s path is fairly stable, while a startup’s path keeps changing.

Who decides between partners?

Dr. Qawwas was asked: should a company have one person with the final say? He answered that the problem starts on day one. A founder picks a partner for a specific reason, such as a gap in sales, tech or marketing. When a dispute over who decides what shows up later, the fault is often in how the partner was chosen in the first place.

When does company culture start?

Ahmad Nahas asked: is company culture only for big companies, or does it start on day one? Fallaha said it is made from the first moment, in the way the founder and the team deal with each other every day, even in a small project. Dr. Qawwas said culture takes shape with the first group that joins the company, then gets more complex at each stage of growth. He gave an example: a salesperson brings the company a million dollars, but breaks the value of respect that the company stands for. Fallaha answered that some things can be let go, but some red lines cannot be crossed, even for the million.

A question from the room: where is the talent?

Tarek Ammar, founder of a game development studio in Syria, asked how hard it is to find talent and keep it. His team trained a number of applicants, and in the end only a few stayed. Dr. Qawwas answered that the market has just come out of its hardest stage, that the people who stayed are the founders who built everything with their own hands, and that it will take time for experienced people to come back.