One of the big challenges for founders will be to spread the culture of focus within their team. Usually, in the early days, with a team of 5, 10, 20 people, this is quite easy. Everybody knows everybody, the team is small, and people know what a founder expects of them. The CEO has direct contact with everyone. Once you get 50+, scaling a culture based on getting the right things done becomes more complicated.
In this last chapter, we share some tips to favorize a culture of focus and scaling it overtime.
1. The importance of Purpose and Vision
Attitude is everything. Being grateful and passionate about your life will help you overcome difficult hustle days and spread the passion among your team.
If you’re not doing what you love right now, seek out the small things that bring you joy and start a daily gratitude practice to keep a positive mindset.
Your passion, enthusiasm and determination are contagious.
Work on defining a clear purpose. Be able to explain it in a simple and understandable manner. The purpose behind your startup is one of the best weapons you have to attract and retain talent. Keeping the purpose top of the mind of your team is essential to have your team fully engaged.
2. Set up Values that encourage the Focus Culture
Your value will define the behavior and attitude the team should strive for. Having values that recall the importance of getting the right things done, decision making, experiment mindset or data approach will help to install a culture of focus.
Some examples of companies that have embedded Focus in their core Values:
Seedstars - the International Accelerators for Startups in emerging markets as for value #GetShitDone and #InExperimentWeTrust.
Hubspot - says in his culture code “Debates should be won by better data, not better job position” and define 5 attributes there people should have to fit their culture. One of those is “Being Remarkable” (standing out):
- Being remarkably helpful
- Resourceful
- Effective
They also push for Experimenting and brand themselves with “We don’t mind making mistakes, we mind repeating them”
If you want your values to become anchored in your team DNA. You, as founder, need to live and embrace this culture, acting (not only talking) through those values.
3. Make Decisions, Communicate Changes and Expectations
We have seen that getting shit done is about the capacity of making decisions. Founders are expected to make decisions on what is the direction the company is to take. As you grow, leaders should have authority to make decisions related to their field of expertise (see next point about responsibility for additional thoughts).
Then for any decision to be effective, it also needs to be communicated well and on a regular basis. In his book, Elad Gil recommends to “Make a list of the people most likely to be unhappy with the change and reach out to them quickly after the announcement,or speak to them before the change if necessary. Communicate directly and clearly, and compassionately. Don’t beat around the bush when doing the re-org. Explain in clear language what is happening and why”.
4. Promote Individual Responsibility
All CEOs dream is that their team takes more ownership. What is contradictory is that most CEOs also struggle to let full responsibility on their team shoulders. Taking responsibility and ownership is not but an easy role. Most people feel pretty uncomfortable and unsafe about it. They want freedom but without the responsibility. As founder, your role is to encourage proactivity. Let people assume their responsibilities. This is the only way to build a team accountable, proactive, and acting independently together.
It is somehow similar to when you grow up. You want to go on holidays without your parents but don’t want to work a day a week to make some extra money and pay for your trip. Becoming Independent, is Becoming responsible. You need parents that give you the chance to be independent and gain freedom over time, by teaching you ownership. Good parents are also fine with the consequences that might happen to you if you do not take your responsibilities. If you don’t find a job, then you don’t go on holidays. Next time, anticipate, this is your key takeaway!
Founders or team leaders are either too “protective”, they micromanage, not giving their team freedom to try and fail. Team members will therefore never be comfortable with responsibilities, they will not be proactive as they wait for you to tell them what they should do. Eventually, natural proactive talent will get frustrated and leave. Or founders are too “cool”, meaning they are fine letting you gain more freedom but avoid you to bear the consequences of it. In that case your team will be creative, feel safe to share ideas but not necessarily they will be able to focus on what matters or think strategically. The most common examples are the marketing team or with a community manager role. As those roles request a good dose of creativity, content generation, rapidity of action, those teams are usually good at building content, campaign, new event concepts, etc. The intervention of the CEO is often requested to help the team define the objective behind the campaign and the hypothesis behind. This is fine with a small team but the more you grow, the more you will need people able to visualize the need, design marketing experiments accordingly and track results! When you build a team of over 200+ people, you will no longer be able to dig into each campaign to understand if they will help test hypotheses.
If you want a team focused, proactive and able to make decisions, you need first to take and assume your responsibilities and second to give the opportunity to your team members to gain freedom by having more responsibilities. Teach them to come up with their problems, help them to frame those well. Then don’t give them solutions but recommendations. Empower them to make the final decision and take ownership! Your role is also to give them responsibilities that they have the skills and experience to embrace. You don't let a kid go on holidays on his own at 6 years old!
5. Embrace Failure with Courage
It is critical to create an environment where it is good to admit mistakes. For this to be effective, it has to be driven from the top. Founders have much as they have to make decisions fast, need to admit mistakes fast so that measures of iteration can be undertaken. Likewise, with team leaders, this will then widespread a certain “comfort” of being wrong and sharing it fast within the team that will help you focus and move faster.
6. Celebrate what matters
When it matters, your team, fans, and investors will push you forward. If you celebrate the wrong things, you'll wake up from the celebration no closer to success.
Acknowledging and marking the accomplishment of the right things is important to enhance your culture of focusing on what matters. This is exactly the same as measuring what matters.
Some examples of common celebrations that doesn’t really equal success:
- Celebrating People that worked late.
- Celebrating an Award or the first Page in Forbes.
- Celebrating a round: raising money is probably the most celebrated momentum in the startup world. That said it is not necessarily a success per se. It just gives you more time (because more cash) to get closer to success, together with a lot more duties and responsibilities toward your investors.
If we continue the parallel with the metrics, those successes could somehow be compared to “vanity” success. They make us feel better but they don’t imply we succeed.
Examples of impactful momentums that should be celebrated:
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Increase of your Retention over at least 3 quarter.
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Release of a new version of your product that optimises your cost and the value for your users.
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Hitting ambitious Sales Target.
Those are successes that have a direct impact on your business. They should be celebrated and team should be acknowledged for their performance. Finally, you should reward people based on performance as well as culture.
7. Encourage People to take a break
As we just said. Don’t celebrate people working late, celebrate results!
Taking a break is important for everyone! First, this is a health question. Second, this leads to better performance. Putting your brain on OFF could increase your creativity and problem-solving capacity. In his book, 7 habits of highly effective people, Stephen R. Covey, insists on the importance to also focus on what matters to you in life and to manage your energy. As he said “Don’t work yourself to death. Strive for a sustainable lifestyle that affords you time to recuperate, recharge and be effective in the long-term.”
Encourage people to take ownership of their well being and to know what type of break and leisure will help them be more performant and happier. Note that if you have done your work promoting individual responsibilities, these sixth principles should be easy to implement as people will take action for themselves.
By the way, again you should lead by example. A CEO’s energy levels dictate those of the team. You should find time to take vacations and truly be offline, otherwise you will lose energy, burn out and potentially give up. This means once a year you should take a real one- to two-week vacation, and every quarter you should take a three-day weekend (Elad gil, High Growth Handbook, 2018). Risks are the same for you than for your employees, colleagues, etc. So if you want your top talents to take a break, take a break yourself!
8. Synergize - Together Stronger
As we said in Platzi, Team is better than heroes. Working in a team will help you achieve goals you could not reach individually. Within your team, you have different squads or groups that might be often in conflict. Salespeople and Operation People for example, while salespeople want to maximise revenue, operations people want to maximise quality of execution.
You will often see an operation or execution team mad at Sales People “for selling too much and too fast”. There is often a natural tension between engineering and product management. Sales People are also upset with finance because they take too long to invoice their clients. A golden rule to deal with those frustrations is to make people aware that complaining is not an option. When teams have a conflict they should look for solutions and if needed ask the help of a mediator. This is their responsibility to ensure team cohesion. This does not mean to avoid conflict. People should seek first to understand where the problem or frustration is coming from. Learn to listen to each other. Look for win-win situations. They should find compromises that are suitable for all parties.
JoyTunes, a US fast growing startups of over 200+ people, mentioned that intense teamwork was one of the key principles that distinguished JoyTunes extremely good performance from not so good performance.
The CEO also added the fact to do whatever was needed, no ego. This is something startups should promote more, humility! Probably it’s hard to instaure because it has, again, to come down from the founders and as successful (or not) founders it has not always been easy to remain humble. It's a hard balance to be ambitious but egoless.
Also a good practice to foster team synergise as well as ensuring knowledge transfer and a good onboarding is to establish a buddy program for new recruits
A parenthesis on Growing your Team and Startups?
We often use a number of people hired to determine what is a high growth company. While job creation definitely have an impact on economies and people lives, I would question the use of # of people working as metrics determining your growth stage and somehow your impact.
One of the common mistakes when we scale and lose velocity is to think the answer is in the lack of people working in the team to get things done. Therefore the automatic reaction is to hire. Indeed, having more people might increase relevant insights, diversity of perspectives and quality of work. But it might also bring more complexity for leaders or executives to manage. If your top talent spends too much of their time solving expectations problems, conflicts and teaching new talents, then hiring might not be the answer to better quality, velocity and performance.
To maximize the chance of positive marginal output to team performance, give onboarding to new recruits. Pair a new hire with a “buddy”—someone who is not in the reporting chain of command with them who can take them to lunch, introduce them to people, and importantly answer any “stupid” questions they may have. Buddies tend to be paired for one to three months.
Also, Set goals Each manager can set 30-, 60-, and 90-day goals for new employees. This gives a sense of direction, context, and structure for the new employee. It emphasizes what is important to get done and individual’s priorities. In other words, it sets expectations!
Summary
Scaling a culture of focus is not an easy thing.
If you have to retain one fundamental to start building this culture of getting the right things done, it is this one: “Lead by example and embed the virtue of being focused”.
Educate and coach your leaders to embody this virtue as well.
- Make sure they are ambassadors of your company purpose.
- Give them Responsibility and empower them to make decisions.
- Be rigorous on them being rigorous.
- Request proactivity.
Your leaders are somehow your “culture franchisee”, they will replicate the core culture within their team.
Finally, make sure your team is grown in a climate promoting discipline and constant search for working on what matters to get close to the end vision:
- Remind the team the purpose.
- Define values that somehow represent the code of work conduct expected.
- Give room for failure and the takeaways it brings back.
- Celebrate what matters.
- Be rigorous on building a team and not a group of individual superheroes.
