Startups are built for a single reason, and that is to be able to scale.
For startups to be successful, you need a core group of people that are ready to change the world.
If you start out with the wrong core, you’ll practically start with a handicap and it’ll take much longer to get to the scaling stage, which means you will not be able to affect lives and eventually make a change in the world.
Remember, the foundation of your team matters.
Startups don’t just suddenly succeed. The right people need to be behind it to be able to make it work.
Do you have the right team around you?
The Key Components
It starts with your executives. This comprises of what your culture will eventually become.
The CTO needs to really know his job and the scope of the product. The CEO needs to be able to run the company and lead by example. Etc.
In most startups, these in executive roles are usually the main partners/owners. This makes it all the more important.
I can’t stress this enough, you really need to have balanced company owners that can work together and resolve things quickly. Be sure everybody is in line OR make sure there’s a way to easily resolve issues or conflicts.
This attitude trickles down to the rest of the team and that usually means your first 5-10 hires.
A major component is finding and hiring the right people. Every person plays an important role in this startup phase. Everybody needs to understand their role and how their performance will contribute to the overall grand scheme of things.
And before you know it, you have a basis for your company culture that you can cultivate and shape to how you want it to be.
In our case, we wanted a strong relationship between our team. We only hired people who would actually enjoy working together with the existing team, yet they should still be talented (the IT pool is scarce) and excited to work with us.
You might look at things differently and just rush to hire people to join your cause. I would suggest that you bide your time on this as it’s a critical stage. Sure, you can get lucky but in most cases, it’ll spell trouble in the long run and might even hurt the rest of the team’s effectiveness.
Why You Need to Continue to Improve as an Entrepreneur
From my years of working with a team, I learned some invaluable things that a lot of entrepreneurs will find hard to do, whether they are new or have been at it for a while.
– Trust & Delegate
Trusting and eventually delegating work will always be a challenge to entrepreneurs as most of us are wired to do it on our own.
Take the time to learn these skills. It will take time but it’s worth it. You’ll be able to free up more time, do other more important tasks that you really need to do and improve your team as well as they learn new skills.
When I started, I really had trouble trusting someone with what I do because I know I’m the best at what I do! It took a while for me to realize that I really have to do this. I can’t be the only one that does these things!
Then the delegation part comes in. I had to learn how to properly delegate. Some people will find it easier to understand with just a couple sentences, some people will need “documentation” to fully understand the task. These are skills you need to learn and just do! You have to!
When I was younger,I wanted to be good at different things. It’s just my nature. This made it hard for me to learn this process of trusting and delegating.
You’re at this stage now for a reason. It’s time to switch up your mindset to this:
“Do what you like to do and find people that have complimentary skillsets to yours.”
– Understand Personalities
Each person is different. We all know that for a fact. By having a team, you automatically inherit different personalities that needs to be managed. Sure, they can all work together and get along but because of different personalities, they will have different outlooks or ways on how they work.
Understanding that allows you to manage and work with your team better.
– Collaboration and Training = Parts of the Game
Founders regularly forget about training simply because they have so much to do.
But don’t skip training! Your team needs to continue to keep learning, just like you do!
In order for your team to progress and be able to help you change the world, they need education. This comes in the form of exercises, training sessions, projects and even, collaboration with other team members.
You have to encourage them to keep learning and tickle their curiosity. As the founder, you need to make sure your team doesn’t become complacent.
We might think “IT people” will, by nature, automatically be adept to learning new technologies or new improvements in the field but you’d be surprised as to how many people will actually stop from what they learned from school. It can be because it’s just their nature (though they just need the extra nudge) but some of them just do not want to improve further. You don’t want the latter to be part of your team.
Encourage training and collaboration for your team and make sure that your CTO is fully on board.
For us, we have an open desk setup in the office. People can go to other team members that they can collab a project with to further their learning of a new software or they can approach our CTO to get insights on where to start. They can apply these new things into a side project and often these technologies they learn can be applied to what we are doing.
– Persuasion Can Go a Long Way
You need to learn how to persuade. You’ll notice that your team members have their own ideas on how to implement or show certain things but at the end of the day you have a vision of how it should be (whether it’s based on analytics they didn’t see or whatever) so you need to learn how to persuade them to do something as you need it to be.
By simply telling them what to do and enforcing it will demotivate them and I guarantee you it will hurt productivity, not just for the individual, but for the whole team.
You don’t want to be a tyrant. Learn to persuade and you’ll go a long way.
All of those I listed above will help you build a better team. I do not expect you to just jump in and just understand all of them. It’ll take time to adjust and learn to trust and let go.
As the founder, success is your responsibility and your obligation.
That includes making your team function better. Remember, as startups we have major GOALS that we need to hit and we can’t do that if the startup team you build can’t perform at a level that you need them to.
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TL;DR
As with all great companies, they were built starting with great people. This is why your foundation matter.
Building a great startup team that will take you over the top is not easy. Actually, it’s practically the most challenging part of building and growing a startup.
Since you skipped the stuff up there, then here are some quick tips that I want you to consider when starting out or if you are shaping your current team.
- It starts at the top
- Identify strengths, manage personalities
- Continue to improve as an entrepreneur in order to run a team better
- Grab the best talent but never sacrifice how they can fit in with your existing team
Now go out there and build your ultimate startup team.
Tell me about your biggest issues and how you eventually solved it by leaving a comment below or snapping me.