EVOLVE - 3 Essential Practices for Entrepreneurs to Lead a Successful Startup Team
During the development of Evolve, our latest accelerator, we have been identifying the challenges that hold entrepreneurs back as they grow through the phases of building a team. This includes mindset and leadership growth, creating a sustainable growth engine, influencing the people around you, financing your growth, and creating infrastructure.
In my experience, a key moment comes when an entrepreneur has hired their first few team members (what we call the Extension Stage). They have navigated the minefield of recruitment an onboarding and got the people that they want, but a step-change is needed in their behaviour to avoid getting stuck.
The problem is there are only so many hours in the day. As the founder you are used to working in the business, because that’s what you had to do before you had a team. All your skills and the information and context in your head make you the best person to do a lot of the day-to-day tasks, and it’s hard to step up from this when you have more people.
Many founders start to delegate activities, roles and tasks for their team, but fail to provide the context for them to do their best work. This keeps the founder tied to the day-to-day activities for longer than necessary, and slows the growth of the business. In a high-growth startup you really need your team to be at their best! So today we’re exploring three essential practices that we support founders to develop through Evolve, which can help you lead a high-performing startup team.
It’s hard to find time for these things as they are never “urgent”, so other things on your to-do- list will tend to take over. If you would like support, guidance, challenge and accountability to help you develop a winning formula, then check out our Enablement Programme in the Evolve Neighbourhood.
Setting a Vision
A clear vision enables your team to see where you’re trying to get to – it’s a shareable picture or story of the future you want to create. It’s the difference between the leader on a journey saying “carry these over there, now load them onto the cart” and saying “we need to get to the top of that mountain with all our equipment”. The former is simple delegation – giving someone a job to do, and some tasks or projects that will fill their time. The latter is giving them the context they need to perform at a higher level. It gives them a purpose to aspire to and get excited about. They have something to work towards, and are playing a part in a higher purpose. This is what engagement is all about.
The reason this is so great as an entrepreneur is that, once your team are clear on where you’re trying to get to, it also enables your team to create work for themselves rather than having it delegated to them. If they just have a job description and the tasks you delegate to them, then the burden on you is heavy to keep delegating. They will tend to stay within the parameters of what you have given them, and anything outside those parameters falls back on you, the founder.
However with a clear vision, your team will be able to:
Think for themselves about the best way to do a task, and what task might be next.
Proactively approach situations with a business-focussed outcome in mind.
Add value to your business and improve the way you do things. In our journey example from earlier, you may have planned to carry all the water you need. However with the right context, your team may realise that there are stops along the way where you can fill up, which enables you to travel much lighter and faster (information that you wouldn’t have had time to investigate yourself!).
So how can you create a compelling and clear vision of the future? We like Zingermans visioning process, but there are many others you can try depending on whether you like writing or a more visual format.
Once you have created a vision, don’t underestimate how much you will need to communicate and reinforce it. Your team will continually need steering back towards the vision, and will need your help to understand how their works fits into the context. As a founder it’s easy to forget that your team don’t know everything – all the context for the business is in your head and you have to extract and share it, piece by piece, not just once but over and over again until it becomes shared context.
Create and Live by Values
If the vision is where you’re trying to get to, your values are how you will get there. This is not the same as a plan or strategy, but your values provide a structure within which your team can do their best work.
A value is a principle or standard of behaviour that you expect your team to demonstrate and uphold. You can see the Entrepreneurial Spark values here. Using our “journey to the top of the mountain” analogy above, your vision will say where you’re going, but your values might say that along the way we must not run out of water, create unintended fires, come within 200m of any cliff edge or lose any of the pack animals. The team now know what’s important to you and the expedition, and the lines that they must not cross. The same is true of your business – values provide the boundaries within which you operate, and you should be willing to remove a team member who won’t adhere to them because they can cause significant damage to your culture and brand.
For your team, values enable them to make good decisions. When faced with various courses of action, the values give them something to refer to that isn’t just someone’s opinion. In Entrepreneurial Spark, faced with a number of viable options, we might say “Oh, let’s do it this way because it’s more collaborative,” and that’s enough of a reason on its own because collaboration is one of our values.
As a leader, you need to give clear direction about what the company values mean and bring them to life. You should:
Recognise people when they are exemplifying a value
Openly talk about values when sharing your own thoughts e.g. “we need to do X and it’s really important because of Y value”. With this type of reinforcement your team will come to understand what the values mean and how they can apply them.
be swift, direct and firm in taking action on behaviours that you see which threaten your values.
If you don’t know what your values are, or think that refreshing them would be useful, a great exercise can be found here.
When combined with your vision, your values are a powerful structure for enabling proactive teamwork. Your team now know where you’re trying to get to, and the rules of play for getting there, and those two things enable them to unleash the full power of their creativity.
Operating Rhythm
So you know where you’re going and the rules for getting there, now you just need to execute. This is where so many entrepreneurs fall down – they have a big vision and some early success, but they fail to build the structure necessary for their team to deliver effectively.
Developing an operating rhythm is like giving your company a heart-beat. It’s the thing that keeps you moving along even when you’re not conscious of it. A good operating rhythm should include:
Goal setting, both tactical (daily or weekly) and longer term (90-day or annual)
Regular communications between team members with standing agendas, to keep the flow of information going through the business and everyone on the same page.
Accountability (consequences of achieving goals or missing them)
Depth – including activity reinforcing vision, values and culture as well as day-to-day activities.
Visibility – everyone should be clear on the rhythm, how it is managed and their part in it.
You can be as simple or creative as you like with how you set up your operating rhythm, from a weekly call and a Trello board through to daily huddles and a full project management system. It really depends how fast you want to move and how complex your activities are.
In summary, building a team is a true milestone of success on the way to your startup dream. It can be incredibly exciting to bring on talented individuals who can take your business to the next level. But if you want them to fulfil their potential, make sure they have both context and structure to help them navigate, so that you don’t end up lost on the entrepreneurial mountain.
To learn more, join our FREE EVOLVE accelerator. Find everything from super-focussed programmes to get you to your next growth milestone, on-demand support when you need it, free daily community activities and a place to call your entrepreneurial home