Startup Teams, part II: Success Teams

In part I of the series I wrote about Disaster Teams, how to recognize them and a bunch of implied stuff on what to avoid and fix etc.

Now it's time to examine Success Teams.

In many ways startups are very different from large corporations and have a lot more demanding goals and objectives in place. A startup can never be happy with growing the business by 10-15% annually, like a large corporation would. Startups are about opportunity, seizing it, and winning your place in the market and in the minds (possibly hearts as well) of your customers. Startups embody the very spirit of General Douglas MacArthur's slogan "there is no substitute for victory". Startups are there to "Get Real or Go Home" and thus need to have excellent fast moving teamwork in place.

Startup teams should be about things like attitude, values, goals, objectives, motivation, trust, learning, courage, energy, intensity, competence, superior judgement and good communication (emphasis on feedback).

They should not be about: micro-management, processes, business plans, formal matters, profit and loss statements, reports, politics, non-action, vague visions and missions, long hours and exhausted managers, strict roles and responsibilities.

Success Teams are often full of leaders. There isn't just one central person responsible of leadership: everybody leads, and they lead to every possible direction: their own teams, colleagues, their bosses, partners etc.

Here's some elements that I think are important for Success Teams:

1) Complementing competencies and cross-disciplinary skills. A good Success Team is not "one-eyed" and will contain people of different disciplines, having a wide set of competencies. Gaps in knowledge and expertise should be complemented for one, but it is even more important to get differing views, opinions and perspectives on all matter that the startup team needs to deal with.

2) Success Teams don't just placidly agree in total unity all the time: there needs to be a structure of objective critique and challenging. Success Teams are very good at making priority choices and actively choosing to redistribute the few scarce resources the startup has all the time - in order to do this very well a Success Team gets to the bottom of things and questions everything starting from assumptions. The end result is a great understanding of the overall Big Picture for everybody in the team, and an increased ability to make judgement calls and concentrate on the right priorities. Startups concentrating on insignificant details can pretty much ruin the opportunity - whereas smart guidance on priority choices is often absolutely vital to success.

3) Self-organizing and the ability to make on-the-fly choices on priorities is central to Success Teams. In a Success Team all team members have exercised point number 2 there enough to have very good judgement to act on their own, and choose the right priorities. The Success Team leader can often rely on the competence and motivation of his team fully; which is when leadership becomes mostly a game of trust, leading attitudes, values, goals and objectives. What to use as the metric to make priority choices by? "value at stake" - is by far the best metric, when correctly employed.

4) Success Teams talk about the Objective, the Goal and the tangible end result they want to achieve all the time. It is very important to share an understanding of what?, why? between the Success Team. Those two little questions are far more important to startups than how?, who? or even; when?. Knowing the what and the why allows the Success Team to keep all eyes on the desired outcome that leads to tangible results. Success Teams can often rely on team members to get to the objective "on their own" drawing from their own competence. No micro-management is needed and never should be needed in a truly competent Success Team. That doesn't mean the absence of quality control: but rather that every employee is the quality control, all the time. This is essentially about trust and teamwork, which Success Teams build on to achieve great results.

5) While the Big Picture and the Objective might be something that Success Teams talk constantly about, yet they still emphasize the individual (not the collective) which is an important distinction. In economics we have the principle of Marginal Utility and the concept of "decreasing marginal utility"; that teaches us how the most productive individuals of a team are also the hardest to motivate to produce even more than they already are producing. This is precisely the reason why Success Teams celebrate the individuals; they let individual egos shine (occasionally) and get the best (get everything) out of each team member. Playful competition between team members is encouraged, and there needs to be opportunities for solo performances. Solutions are chosen based on merit. Often startups needs creativity and uniqueness more than they need big corporate style efficiency: and this is one of the mechanisms how a startup Success Team can try to assure that creativity trumps efficiency often.

6) Success Teams work close to each other. Physically close. Shared workspaces are important, perhaps a totally open office environment with no cubicles around. Working this way helps in communication, information travels fast when everybody shares the same space. It allows the team to work at a faster pace. Direct dialogue is important to Success Team, as are feelings. Team members need to be OK with sharing feelings, what their "gut instinct" is telling or intuition is saying, etc. Shared space is the best solution for this. Also whiteboards, post-it notes, and well utilized wall space is better than any Google Docs, Basecamp or collaborative software you might come up with. Nothing is as fast as just taking a glance at the whiteboard and having it all there.

7) Success Teams create rules for themselves and they stick to them. Often the kind of rules that I have found useful have to do with decision making, dividing tasks, followup and information sharing. The rest flows quite naturally when you run things based on trust and everybody sharing the same physical space. Ever had "teams" that have meetings lasting 2+ hours, with everybody having a laptop there and buried typing their own stuff, barely listening etc? This is quite common, and its pretty far from the best way to get things done. RunToShop currently has product planning meetings sitting on the floor, often without laptops, just using a whiteboard. Running a Management Team as a Success Team is an entire topic for another blog post on itself. There's tons of stuff you need to encounter there.

8) Active problem solving and discussion is central to Success Teams. When ever there is a problem that should become rather important in everybody's agenda to solve. If the problem happens to be in an area that every team member knows is vitally important in priority regarding the Objective and the Big Picture, then it really should get solved right away there and then. Success Teams actively solve their own problems without any waiting around. There are no Tabus and no "Elephants in the board room". Success Teams rush to help team members and drop everything else instantly if that is required in order to get a high priority problem solved. Success Teams prioritize their work based on value at stake and a big problem quickly becomes a big negative value at stake, so it jumps near to the top of the priority list pretty fast.

9) Startup Success Team concentrates on differentiation a lot. It is a good principle to have separate meetings concerning operations and a separate one concerning only differentiation. All that strategy is or ever was is differentiation, so I'm not even using the word "strategy" here, just gonna go with "differentiation" since that is essentially what matters the most to startups in any case. www.muxlim.com has this way for working: Muxlim has separate meetings for planning operations and a totally dedicated one for differentiation. How often do they meet? Every single day, and at least once a week only for differentiation. Btw, Muxlim should come out with some highly impressive stuff before the end of the year, watch for it.

This list could continue for a while, but I have the feeling that it would go into needlessly precise details quite fast. So I'm stopping here and saving the rest for other blog posts.

Just going to finish with this: startup Success Teams are often agile, constantly changing, iterative, open to new views ideas and total priority changes if the situation or the Objective changes. Writing a multi-phased business plan and stubbornly sticking to it is such a bad idea. Why? because with startups it does not correlate to eventual success at all. If it would thousands of business plan writing consultants would be millionaires already ;)