For the past three months, as a startup founder, I have been focused on customer development, creating a product roadmap, understanding the complexities of …
For the past three months, as a startup founder, I have been focused on customer development, creating a product roadmap, understanding the complexities of the industry of my product, and establishing a company culture. This month in particular I’ve added another component to the mix: team dynamics. To me team dynamics goes beyond culture fit. Culture fit is just a sliver, and is tantamount to does this candidate have a personality type that jives with the rest of the members of the team, and they’re willing to be collaborative, basically guaranteeing long-term harmony on the team. Team dynamics are much more nuanced, and starts with each individual:
- Understand the needs of each individual: what are their motivations, and goals both long-term (years) and short-term (day-to-day and months).
- Analyze their aptitude: this is based on what they have demonstrated a proficiency in over the past several years, and what they are capable of doing.
- Gauge their results: this comes down to giving them a small project, with clearly defined goals and parameters, and a predictable and measurable set of results. Once you’ve done this walk away, don’t micromanage!
It’s not enough to do this once, you have to do it daily, weekly, and monthly. The next step is to piece the team together. Building a founding team comes down to the following:
- Complementary skill sets – you want to make sure that people on the team aren’t stepping on each others toes. Each founding team member should have ownership of what they are doing from the beginning and understand how they are interfacing with one another. As the team grows owners might change and increase or initial members may want to move onto other projects, which is fine and to be expected.
- Communication and comfort – as the founder it is your responsibility to let each member of the founding team know where you are going. Even people in a startups crave stability, and one of the ways of giving them stability is by giving them a sense of where you are headed over the course of the next week and months. Its also really important to attend to their most basic needs: food, water, and shelter. You can’t expect people to work in a stressful environment without compensation!
- Shared vision – before someone becomes an official member of your team you want to make sure they are vested into the direction of the company and share the same values and grand vision as you do. This is a function of you as the founder executing on that mission, and if your direction does change, alert your team of that as soon as your decision is made, or involve them in the decision-making process.
My team is obviously very important to me, and I think about each person individually, and how they fit together. The reason its important to go through this set of criteria and process is because the founding team you build translates to high performance in both good and bad times, the sort of people they will in turn attract to build out the company, and their decision-making process that will affect the course of your startup’s future and success.
