Sustainable Startup

It's Not What You Communicate, But How You Communicate!

I just finished reading The New Science of Building Great Teams by Alex Pentland. This paper, put out in the Harvard Business Review, is one of the most fascinating reads I have had in a long time, kudos again to Paul Readwin our Chief Intelligence Officer at Business Instincts for coming across this as part of his ongoing research.

Pentland is a Professor at MIT, the director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, and the chairman of Sociometric Solutions. Alex and his team have spent years developing a discrete monitoring system for teams in the form of a small personal badge. This badge is attached to your lapel. The purpose of the badge is to monitor all the movements and interactions of the members of a team. During the first hour or so of use people tend to be very conscious of the badge and alter their behaviors as such, after a few hours, much less a few days or weeks, humans cannot help but interact in their normal behavior. The badges and system have been tested now over several years and are revealing some of the most fascinating behavioral data that is now available on the performance of teams.

Most fascinating about the research to date is the fact that the #1 most important factor to a team's performance is not what is communicated but how it is communicated. Seriously, the content is less important, by far, than the delivery and the setting. The more a team is given the opportunity to create personal connections in a professional setting, the stronger the team interaction will be.

Pentland goes on to say, “The thinking is that what is known as Patterns of Communication matter so much because language is a relatively recent development and was most likely layered upon older signals that communicated dominance, interest and emotions among humans. Today these ancient patterns of communication still shape how we make decisions and coordinate work among ourselves.

Consider how early man may have approached problem solving. One can imagine humans sitting around a campfire (as a team) making suggestions, relating observations, and indicating interest or approval with head nods, gestures, or vocal signals. If some people failed to contribute or to signal their level of interest or approval, the group members had less information and weaker judgment, and so were more likely to go hungry”.

The overarching finding was that high performance teams were ones that had the most even distribution of communication and influence as opposed to those teams that had little communication and one or a few individuals dominated any communication that existed. Several techniques and methods are available to ensure that a high performance team can thrive. Interestingly, almost always the first recommendation that Pentland makes to improve team performance is to make it more social. Have teams take coffee breaks together, do lunches, have group check-ins, and constantly mix things up so that casual interaction can take place across all members of the team.

Alignment Vs. Manipulation

This past week, on a very respected and widely read management blog I read the following:

“Here’s the Best Definition of Employee Engagement You’ll Ever See Anywhere, Somebody once told me – and this is some of the best advice I ever got – that for any business there are three levels of leadership. One is getting somebody to do what you want them to do. The second is getting people to think what you want them to think; then you don’t have to tell them what to do because they will figure it out.”

This type of statement is at the root of so many of our management challenges in all corporate cultures. Organizations and their leaders are thinking that aligning a team is about “getting them to think what you think”. Personally, I think this is closer to Manipulation than Alignment. Everyone wants employees to tow the company line, because the saying is true, at the end of the day you’re either on the team or you’re not. But as an employee, how that looks will always differ from the views of management. Creating engagement amongst employees doesn’t require manipulation, because that’s not true engagement, it requires corporate alignment.

Aligning a team can be done and great organizations do it, here are the four basic principles to help ensure your team is aligned.

Awareness – Know your values, beliefs, Brand Promise, and Strategic Differentiators. Know why your organization exists, what it does and how it does what it does.

Recruiting – Use a proven hiring process that utilizes methods not just to finding the skill set you need but also to screen for the cultural fit as outlined in the Awareness principle. Aligned companies recognize skill, and hire for attitude. One is a skill that can be learned, the other is inherent.

Listening – Give people a voice and a venue to utilize it. Let people know they have been heard by acting on what you can. Publicly acknowledge what you won’t be acting on and why, doing this gives you the opportunity to reinforce all your key metrics in the Awareness principle.

Attachment – Lose your ego, and insist on candor. Doing so will allow people to feel free to speak the truth and not the politically best answer. This is powerful as people’s truth, whatever it is, is better than getting people to say “what you want them to think”. The end result of this is getting past each personal bias and getting to the root of “What is right” not “who is right” which helps the team grow and develop.

Integration in a Tight Job Market

The integration of two companies can be tough at the best of times, but when the job market is tight there are some specific things to look out for. These are the factors that management needs to keep their eyes open and skills sharp for.

A lot of integrations fall apart or are not accretive. Most of the time I think this happens because of two straight forward reasons:

First management and the subsequent teams involved (from the experienced and tenured to those fresh in the door) are unclear and unaligned in their expectations. Secondly there is an underlying and pervasive lack of candour.

These problems are amplified in a market where it is tough to find the talent necessary to execute your business model and plan. The big challenge is obviously not being able to afford to lose any people, in particular if they are the right people. A tight market breeds competition and offers to drop the company line and go elsewhere become tempting if management is unable to keep alignment with an organization.

The flip side to this is that you have to work with what you have. And as any great management team will tell you, when you make something work you attract more talent.

Attracting the right people in a tight job market makes it even tougher on your competition as the real "battlefield" is in the attraction and retention of great people. People are inevitably what makes a company great.

So how do you do this? First, you need: Candour - the ability for everyone to respectfully speak their mind and critique everything. If you have this you can create the second thing you need: Alignment - everyone working toward the same goal for the same reason.

Once you have this you can focus on the needs of your people and they know it will be authentic. The needs of people in an organization are 1. The basics - a decent wage, 2.) Autonomy - freedom to make decisions that count, 3.) Mastery - an environment to hone their skills, 4.) Purpose – knowing that what each employee does have an effect on where the company is going.

Do this and your integration in a tight job market will become a strategic advantage for your organization. For more insight on this see Sustainable Startup

Give Away What You've Learned In Support of Prosperity

“In today's environment, hoarding knowledge ultimately erodes your power. If you know something very important, the way to get power is by actually sharing it.”

- Joseph Badaracco

A startup is an organization that has created something great from a simple concept. You’ve taken your team and idea, approached it tenaciously while keeping your passions in perspective and grown it into a Sustainable Startup with a team that is able to communicate and scale together. While being poised to grow and able to scale are important for any startup, for a Sustainable Startup giving away what you’ve learned is a priority.

The immediate concern that arises tends to be about trade secrets or competitive advantages you’ve created during your startup’s run. There are certain things which will probably remain inside your business, after all Google doesn’t readily display its algorithms to its competitors. However sharing your knowledge, tactics and strategies creates a community around your startups and feeds experience down through the entrepreneurial ecosystems. We believe there are five primary reasons that as a startup you should give away what you’ve learn in support of prosperity.

1) If you’ve created a successful, Sustainable Startup, creation is your first instinct, not hoarding.

The first instinct for creative individuals is to share their creations and continue to innovate. Artists don’t produce their works and keep them to themselves, writers don’t write novels and hide them away in safes, their instinct is to share what they’ve accomplished and continue to create. Creation in startups is no different, many of the most prominent startups and entrepreneurs are those that have immersed themselves in the cycle of creation, completion, sharing and creation.

2) Hoarding is the same as admitting you can’t do it again.

Giving away what you’ve learned, and sharing your experiences means you can accept the challenge of starting again with an even playing field. By contributing your knowledge to the startup ecosystem you are proving to yourself that you are capable repeating your successes.

3) You are not operating in secret.

Especially in the era of Web 2.0 very little is secret and even less remains that way for long. As we’ve mentioned in earlier Principles there are no new ideas, simply different perspectives and to assume your project or projects are secret and unique is misguided.

4) Innovation always evens the playing field.

Innovation happens at such an incredible rate that any perceived advantages on one day can easily be erased the next. Share your ideas and techniques openly and be prepared not only to offer insight, but to be offered great insight by other startup entrepreneurs.

5) Teaching creates new perspectives.

By sharing your knowledge and techniques you are accepting any questions that may come forward. Unwanted questioning can often create a defensive state of mind which closes the door to further creativity. Teaching what you know and accepting questions or criticisms allows you to see new perspectives and apply it in new ways.

Giving away what you’ve learned supports startup industries, communities and most importantly, your next venture.

Do What It Takes

Step Two: Do What It Takes

“The price of greatness is responsibility.”

- Winston Churchill

   Failing fast is the credo of the lean startup movement. The thought that when you fail individually or as a startup you need to pick yourself up as quickly as possible and move forward, which isn’t what “failing fast” means at all. While it does imply that you shouldn’t rest on your laurels and wait for the next revelation to come out of thin air, what it is really trying to tell you is that you should fail smart.

Take the time to understand why you failed but use that time effectively. Be smart about it. Failing fast, or failing smart, means examining why whatever mistakes were made, were made and how the problems can be fixed. To do this we suggest breaking your analysis of the situation down into five steps.

1) Look at what wasn’t achieved or where the mistakes were made.

Take the time to examine exactly where the mistakes occurred and write them down. When you are looking into mistakes it is crucial to drill down as deep as possible and not just skim the surface. Deep problems can become systemic and bring down more than a single area of your startup.

2) Prioritize your top three

Chances are that when you begin to drill down into your problems or the mistakes that were made you’ll begin to notice that there were either many, or offshoots of a single mistake. By prioritizing your top three mistakes you aren’t saying the other identified aren’t important and shouldn’t be resolved, rather that the three you’ve selected should be solved first.

3) Why could these goals not be hit?

As a team sit down and examine each of the three mistakes individually by asking why it could not be hit. Be careful not to place blame by asking “why was this goal not hit”, as you’ve already acknowledged mistakes and are now working to move forward.

4) What is the new goal?

Now that you’ve taken the time to understand exactly where the mistakes were and why they could not be hit, it’s time, as a team, to decide what your next steps are. Using your learning from why your previous goals could not be hit will help you to develop strategies for creating and hitting new goals.

5) What needs to be done, by when, to achieve this goal by who?

Now that tasks have been created, responsibility needs to be assigned within the team. Part of acknowledging mistakes is accepting where responsibilities are going to lay. Take time as a team to structure timeframes and measurements to help accomplish the new goals you have set. 

If you want more information on a framework to do this, check out www.businessinstincts.ca and click on Clarity Management and the RIPKIT Process.

Acknowledging Mistakes in a Sustainable Startup

Principle 5 - Step One

 “A man should never be ashamed to own that he is wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”

- Alexander Pope

Startups fail perhaps more than any other business. Not to say that they aren’t or won’t be successful businesses in their own rights, but that the opportunity for failure, regardless of scale, exists far more frequently than anywhere else. However within that area of possible and frequent failure is a tremendous space available for growth, if startups are open to it.

Failing and learning from failures are two entirely different things and what invariably separates the successful businesses to those that succumb to failure. There is however a level of humility that is required to bridge the gap between learning and failing and acknowledging your mistakes, both personally and as an organization is the first step. Creating a culture of accountability in your startup, which is part of the sustainable startup model, means taking responsibility for the mistakes that were made in projects and learning how to grow from them.

1) Being wrong is not wrong.

Overcoming the misconception that being wrong is bad requires a fair amount of humility within an organization. While people would clearly rather be right than wrong, making mistakes is an inevitable part of life and work. You will never get it right 100% of the time, it’s simply not possible. Taking the stance that mistakes are an opportunity to grow and learn as opposed to a time for blame and escaping accountability will help your organization grow.

2) Fail fast

Accepting that it is okay to be wrong and okay to fail are important steps for this Principle, but so is keeping your momentum moving. When you fail there is an overwhelming urge to take time to lick your wounds and recover, to rest on your laurels and let the entirety of the situation sink in before moving forward again.

What this does is lessen the impact that your failings have. It not only takes away the sting of the mistakes, but the energy to move forward as well. As children we were told to pick ourselves up off the ground, dust off our knees and try again which is exactly the point of failing fast. Don’t mull over your mistakes or failings, pick yourself up, find solutions, rectify your mistakes and attack it hard. Step Two of this Principle will outline some exercises that we recommend to do what it takes to turn your failures into successes.  

Principle Five: Acknowledge Mistakes And Do What It Takes

“Our greatest strength as a human race is our ability to acknowledge our differences, our greatest weakness is our failure to embrace them.”

- Judith Henderson

Failure within a startup is a fairly frequent occurrence. The important piece of that statement is not that failure happens often, rather that the opportunity to learn and grow exists more in startups than it does anywhere else. Early stage companies and startups must grasp the ideology that being right is not the objective, but learning from their failures and mistakes is.               

Acknowledging mistakes in a startup is often a practice of stepping away from your ego. Where startups are by nature small groups of people working very closely together a skewed sense of responsibility can easily develop. Team members may begin to assume credit for successes and place blame away from themselves when a project results in a failure.

Removing egos from a situation helps all those involved see not only where they can improve, but how the team can be strengthened as well.

We’ve broken Principle Five down into Two Steps:

1) Acknowledge Mistakes

2) Do What It Takes

Measuring to Keep Your Passion in Perspective

Principle Four, Step Two: Measurement

“The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.”

- George Bernard Shaw

Measurement is an extension of alignment. It is the next necessary step to keep passion in perspective and egos in check. It is often said that if something cannot be measured, then it isn’t truly real and without measurement, the clarity and alignment you have achieved through step one will be ineffective if useful at all.

The ability to measure your How in a startup is effectively how you will gauge your successes, failures and learnings. In this case what you will be looking to measure is your What. In other words, what do you do, and what will you be doing to accomplish your How.

In businesses finances and goals are generally tracked on a quarterly basis and we don’t for a second suggest deviating from that. Quarterly reporting and tracking of goals allows for companies, managers and team members to understand what they are doing while at the same time seeing how it is important to the company. Taking the time to measure goals on ninety day cycles allows team to compensate and alter their directions when they discover something isn’t working or when new opportunities present themselves.

Measurement however isn’t just about reporting and gauging at the end of ninety days, it involves an incredible amount of diligence. To effectively measure yourself and others you need to know specifically what you will be working on or towards and be comfortable measuring your progress on a weekly basis. A method we have found effective for doing this is to complete the following process twice, once for setting the goals of the team and a second time to set the individual goals of the team members to have them effectively work towards accomplishing those set for the team.

1: Write it down

As you should with all brainstorming sessions, get it written down.  Whether this is for setting team or individual goals, start writing. The easiest way to get ideas flowing, especially ideas that fall in line with the company goals is to start writing and brainstorming.

By doing this you are not only increasing your understanding of the direction the team or individuals are going, but they are helping themselves as well. The important thing to remember is to always set a measurement guideline with every action.

If your action is to “Give Funding Presentations” there has to be a measureable quality to the action. Whether that is “Give Ten Funding Presentations” or “Give Ten Funding Presentations by May 1”. If you are proactive in your measurements and meet on a weekly basis, these types of quantitative measurements allow you to track and gauge your progress.

2: Vote it through

This isn’t to say all the tasks and goals you’ve written down aren’t important, but the vote it through process will allow you to determine what will be the top three goals you’ll be working toward over the next quarter.

This process of voting through (done either with the entire team or as individuals) helps to determine the focus of your goals.  By selecting and voting as a team you are allowing the clarity and alignment practices you’ve done earlier to come to fruition.

For setting team goals, have each member of the team select which three goals they believe are the most important, by attaching point values to them (3 for most important, 2 for second most important and 1 for third most important). To determine the top three goals, add up all the votes and the goals with the three highest point scores become your objectives. For Individuals, have them select their top three goals from all those listed. This allows individual team members to suggest and hopefully decide their goals for the next ninety days, goals that should fall in line with the goals set by the team, for the team.

Creating Clarity & Alignment

Principle 4 – Step 1

Keeping passion in perspective and ego’s in check is often like watching a sheepdog round up a flock of sheep. It requires absolute diligence at all times and the knowledge that sometimes, a little bite isn’t a bad thing but is in fact necessary.

Passion and tenacity can work hand in hand in a very synchronistic relationship. One feeds the other and constantly pushes its boundaries. Tenacity chasing Passion is almost as dangerous as Passion alone.  Tenacity drives startups while unbridled passion destroys them. Keeping both these triggers in check requires two very simple and always complex things: Clarity and Alignment.

Clarity:

Team and individuals need to know why they are doing what they’re doing. Whether its long term, short term or just daily tasks there needs to be a system in place that helps guide these actions. Clarity becomes about seeing how the actions of each team member affect the picture both big and little. Much the same way that Principle One is designed to determine a company’s Why, Step 1 helps to create the Why, How and What for each team member.

Why am I doing what I’m doing?

How am I going to get my “why” done?

What is the day to day result of what I do?

Having your team members ask these questions of themselves will help them achieve clarity within their position and in their actions. If you are having a “passion” or ego problem with a team member or partner, have  them do this exercise and review it in conjunction with the Why, How, and What or your Why, How and What and determine where you differ and how you can change for the better.

Alignment:

In Principle One alignment is encouraged through the creation of Personal Elevator Pitch (PEP) and while the PEP is effective for determining an individual’s role an extra step is required for helping keep the ego in check.

This extra step requires a lot of initial footwork to create a culture that allows for pushback from all employees.  Constructive conflict in a startup is used to pushback against ideas, not to discredit and necessarily dissuade but to get to the core of the idea itself.

Constructive conflict is a necessary measure to keep egos in check and passion in perspective in startups:

1: How is it currently done?

Gather your team or those having passion problems and sit down to discuss the situation. Write down How each member, or members specifically accomplish their PEP.

2: Is there a different way?

Have all members sit down and discuss other ways in which the How can be accomplished. This is a brainstorming session so let every idea get put up and discussed.

3: Vote it through:

After the brainstorming is done have each member of the team vote for their top three methods. Attach numbers to each idea, 3 for most valuable, 2 for second, 1 for least. After each member has voted add up the numbers to determine which is the agreed upon method of accomplish How.

When ideas are presented or suggested often there is a great deal of attachment to them. People tend to emotionally invest themselves in solutions or suggestions they have brought forward. This passion and attachment can become problematic when ideas are challenged. Creating situations of constructive conflict in which ideas are challenged removes the personal link between people and the ideas.

If passion can be removed and the focus can be placed on what the idea represents teams can effectively determine whether the idea is beneficial to your startup or not. 

Passion is the #1 Cause of Failure in Startups

Principle 4 – Passion is the #1 Cause of Failure in Startups

Entrepreneurs, especially startup entrepreneurs are notorious for their passion. There are few greater examples of people that believe so whole-heartedly in what they are doing than the startup investor. Most business writing you’ll read will probably tell you that are a good thing, that passion is the number one key to success in a startup. We propose that they are wrong in a very large way. We would even go so far as to say that passion is the number one reason for failure in startups.

Passion is an emotion built on attachment and ego. It’s a great emotion to have and essential to a startup, but is something that needs to kept and held in check. Uncontrolled passion is a sure a sign as any of an impending implosion. Startups that attach to their product or service with the knowledge that it is the ‘right’ way risk everything based on a bias. This attachment and emotional trigger forms a bias around the How of an idea, or startup, not the Why.

What is really being talked about is tenacity. Tenacity is the relentless, dogged pursuit of your Why. As was talked about in Principle One, your idea isn’t that important. Getting caught up in How you do something will only serve to hamstring your success, but truly understanding your Why will allow you pursue that goal with relentless doggedness.

If you want to truly embrace your tenacity and keep your passion in check there are two steps we like to follow:

1) Clarity & Alignment

2) Measurement