Choosing your team is like putting together a puzzle. To succeed, you need to find the proper combination of complementary talents.
A desire to change the world, think creatively, and to work in a culture of innovation, are all reasons people pursue careers in startups over big companies. America's best and brightest are no longer seeking the corner office--instead, they're offering up their talents to technology companies in the hope of building something better.
Most startups come with a caveat: the agile, fast-paced nature of a newborn business isn't for everyone. The risk-adverse, status quo, complacent-types need not apply. Yet, hiring a bunch of go-getters is not the sole solution to creating a successful team. Big egos and arrogance can turn the office into a battlefield--a killer for a small company.
Instead, strive for balance as you hire. Here are the six personalities every startup needs: 1. The Dreamer
Every startup needs a dreamer. It's a motivating force in creating the company from day one and a sustaining force every day after. Most CEOs and founders have this characteristic, but it's not exclusive to management. The dreamer inspires, excites, and leads the company from a sky-high view.
Don't rely solely on your own leadership. Hiring other dreamers will help sustain momentum when your energy lags. Cultivate this quality in your employees by sharing your big, scary ideas and encourage them to do the same. Consistently communicating your vision to the team empowers them to help you build it (or come up with angles you missed entirely). 2. The Manager
The manager takes a dream and makes it happen. He or she is pragmatic, reliable, and has the initiative to turn ideas in action items. Charisma is less important here, it's all about being approachable, trust-worthy, and forward thinking. The manager understands that while the team needs a vision, it also needs tangible tasks to execute. The manager defines roles, outlines goals, and ensures that each individual is hitting the mark.
Most articles about hiring for startups don't talk about structure--it's not sexy, but it's the most crucial ingredient to achieving the things you envision. The manager will get you there. 3. The Builder
The builder thinks like an architect and acts like a tradesman. He or she has a clear understanding of the company vision and knows how to create it. The builder knows when to seek counsel and when to make an executive decision. He or she is intuitive, bright, and inventive. Ever worked with someone who, with little direction, seems to understand and create exactly what you want? That's the builder at work. I can't emphasize the value of this person enough. 4. The Workhorse
The workhorse is happy to step up and do whatever it takes to make the company engine purr. You will never hear the words: "It's not my job" come out of this person's mouth, and as a result, they will become your rock. The workhorse gets things done behind the scenes, be it ordering office furniture, assisting other team members, or following up on a suggestion you once made in a meeting. In all honesty, chances are most people in a startup will have the workhorse personality trait. Their egos don't need to be stroked, but a little recognition goes a long way. 5. The Penny Pincher
Anyone who's been part of a founding team will empathize with the experience of boot strapping. Funding (if and when it comes) is sweet, but you can never quite shake intolerance for wastefulness and the joy that comes from frugality. I respect team members that understand the importance of being efficient with budgets. The penny pincher questions every purchase and never commits to a cost without first considering the alternative options. He or she is creative with budgets, doesn't spend unnecessarily and understands the difference between need and want (and is accepting of the difference). The penny pincher personality trait speaks volumes to me--it means he or she cares about the long-term health of my company and is committed to getting me there. 6. The Social Butterfly
When there's work to be done it's tempting to create a vacuum. The earphones go on, the chat is switched off, and the body language shouts, "do not disturb." Removing distraction is a vital strategy in getting meaningful work done. Yet, what happens when there's always work to be done? These individual cells of silence can kill company morale when repeated over the long term. Never underestimate the importance of creating strong morale and a fun culture. The person with the ability to create connections among team members, laugh at themselves and others, and shift perspective at the right time, is an essential ingredient to a happy team.
A range of complementary personalities will lend your office a diversity of perspectives--and help you solve the hiring puzzle.
Digital media have triggered profound shifts in consumers interactions and relationships with businesses. The language of B2C and B2B is no longer relevant. We use the terms business and consumer (B&C) and business and business (B&B) to describe how businesses and consumers now work together to create brands. Consumer-created content and conversations are driving organizations image, reputation and bottom line. This represents a significant shift in dynamic. As consumers become increasingly influential, businesses are becoming less powerful.
This means that you need to focus more on understanding, engaging and staying relevant to consumers, and less on regimenting or controlling them.
Respond to the purchasing revolution
It’s time to tear up the traditional ‘funnel’ model of consumer purchasing. Consumers now go through a dynamic, non-linear decision-making process. What other consumers say about a brand is becoming the most important input in consumer choice. More than two-thirds of global consumers, young and old alike, seek online reviews or recommendations from others. And we’ve all been put off a product or service by a lone bad review.
A fluid and uncertain market is the new normal, which means traditional marketing strategies are no longer effective. In this world, responsiveness trumps efficiency. The ability to engage with customers one-on-one, particularly after purchase, is vital to long-term business success. Doing this adds value, generates revenue and--most importantly--builds customer loyalty.
Yet a quarter of companies don’t solicit post-purchase feedback from customers. They could learn from the way Amazon uses feedback and digital tools to engage customers through its recommendation system, one-click shopping button, loyalty program Prime, credit card and app.
Remove the seams
Just as Amazon simplifies life for customers, digital media can be used to smooth their way through potentially disjointed experiences. Our online and offline worlds are now merged into one ongoing experience. That experience--how audiences encounter and perceive your business--increasingly determines its vitality.
Consumers have become used to buying online, returning in-store and instantly receiving product updates. And they expect each interaction to reflect your brand in a consistent and engaging way. Every aspect of your business, across all departments, experiences, environments and communications should feel the same. Think of Disney’s commitment to magic, Apple’s to humanizing technology or BMW’s to driving experience.
This seamlessness is the holy grail in building relationships with customers, and digital media offer huge opportunities in this quest. So, a fashion retailer can be browseable anywhere, quickly replicate communications across all outlets, offer purchase via QR codes, connect customers to other fans, turn their "likes" into product previews, reward introductions to other customers…
Make digital center stage
Digital media form an intrinsic part of consumers interactions with businesses. So it follows that digital should be central to building relationships with your customers and enhancing their experience. Yet rather than taking a holistic approach, many businesses just use digital media as a promotional or idea generation tool.
Many of us have inboxes full of Groupon or CouponsDaily voucher codes. While this may drive short-term sales, over time it can dent brand perceptions, and ultimately business value. In a few cases, these kind of promotions have led to unsustainably high-volume, low-value demand – with catastrophic results for reputation and revenue.
Crowdsourcing can be a boon for business innovation and public engagement--or a disaster. It all depends on whether you have the systems and knowhow to manage a torrent of ideas effectively.
Well-planned digital activities enable more meaningful connections with consumers.
Create a digital culture
So digital has changed the way we all live our lives and make consumer choices. It also has far-reaching implications for business communication, decision-making and structure.
There is a growing disconnect between the increasingly flexible social networks we all enjoy and the rigid structures and hierarchies in which most of us work. Departmental and divisional silos made sense when efficient production was key to business success but responsiveness is the name of the game now.
In today’s world, anything that hinders speed and agility contributes to failure. To keep up with rapidly changing markets, businesses need to gradually move their structure from a "vertical" approach to a more "horizontal" one.
The way forward is to use digital innovations to bring the outside in. The brightest businesses are creating tools and processes that enable employees to connect and collaborate across the organization.
Summary
Just as business success depends on brand strength, digital is central to successful brands. Brands create value and drive business success. And you need to use digital to make this happen.
It’s easy to be put off by the apparent complexity of digital media, but success comes down to understanding people and behavior. If you can engage consumers and enhance their experience, you will build long-term business sustainability and value.
Never before has a generation needed or had access to more tools to take on the real work that needs to be done in our societies. New leaders are emerging who are less willing to define themselves with a job title than their ability to create value wherever they are. In response, hundreds of new higher educational programs have emerged that focus on creativity and preparing students to solve the world’s big problems. This piece is part of a Collaborative Fund-curated series on creativity and values written by thought leaders in the for-profit, for-good business space.This is because education is shifting from a focus on what works for teachers to a focus on what students need to succeed and thrive. Businesses learned this long ago, with the emergence of the “consumer-driven” paradigm--a self-evident revelation that’s easier to agree with than it is to execute. When education serves students, many of the old beliefs become obsolete; schools that considered themselves competitors become partners by sharing content, faculty and facilities, combining strengths, offering more customized learning, and making life more interesting for all involved.
But in order to truly serve the future leaders of our society, we need to look at the existing failures of contemporary higher education, and the innovations taking place to improve them.
Inside some of the highest-rated business schools in the country, MBA students prepare themselves for secure jobs in management at healthy corporations with plenty of opportunities for growth, or for jobs on Wall Street where fast money can be made. But they are preparing for a world that, for many of them, will never exist. For a real model, we should look instead to the schools that are teaching creativity and design as part of business, like the Rotman School in Toronto, which is preparing students to create their own opportunities wherever they are. And schools like Babson, where the skills of entrepreneurship are required learning for every student who wants to work in business.
Tenured faculty live in inward facing lives of glacial bureaucracy and politics, respected and rewarded for new thinking but unable to act on new ideas because they are frozen in place by administrative processes that take years to evolve. But educational institutions share the same need for agility and fast decision-making to stay relevant and prepare students to meet the demands they will face. Many schools are addressing this challenge by adding affiliated labs or institutions outside the purview of their institutional procedure that can move more quickly to adapt to the changing world outside.
More than anything, education is still a world of silos, where people are taught that becoming a specialist has prestige, meaning, and built-in-job-magnetism. Expertise in a vertical area is important in the mix of required talent, but we need more visionaries with broad experience and curiosity. Breakthrough ideas inevitably come from people who see the relationships between the complex and interrelated systems that connect every single aspect of modern life. We should emphasize programs they develop to bring diversity and cross-disciplinary thinking into their communities. The Social Enterprise Bootcamp co-hosted by Columbia, NYU, and SVA in New York is a good example of students taking learning into their own hands.
The only way to succeed in creating something new is to define the desired end at the beginning. We need business to become more adaptive to the realities of our planetary limitations and more responsible. We need a sustainable economy that supports mission-based organizations. We need to create the kind of jobs that will build a resilient future and not simply more of our unsustainable past. Our goal, as a species, has to be to address the challenges we have created, to invent new solutions using fewer precious resources, to increase our understanding of the impact we have, and to change our behavior accordingly.
Education is learning how to teach us to do that.
Socrates' admonition to "know thyself " is relevant to all leaders, but perhaps especially so to entrepreneurs. Founders are wise to reflect inward before building outward: What are your purpose and values? What is your vision for your life? What are the key goals in the different areas of your life? What is your tolerance for risk? What are you willing to give up to make your venture succeed? What kind of culture do you want to establish?
These questions will be answered, by either conscious choice or default. Excellent, ethical, and enduring organizations do not magically appear without conscious and persistent effort--you need the right fit.
Employee Fit: Recruiting is tough for startups because they have very little that is tangible at the outset, and they lack brand recognition. Founders must explain their vision and convince talented people to take a leap of faith, forgoing higher salaries and greater security elsewhere. They have to believe.
Complementarity. Entrepreneurs must go beyond recruiting people with head and heart. They need to recruit people whose skills augment their own. Technical founders who are weak in finance or sales, for example, should not just hire other techies. It is essential to have a detail-oriented person on the team—a point overlooked in many new ventures.
Entrepreneurs should hire for the skills lacking on the team, while ensuring that new recruits share the dream, have integrity, and fit the culture. Entrepreneurs must build a complementary team, with people who enhance one another's capabilities, making a more balanced or complete whole. Recruiting is not an exact science. Even the best organizations, without the time and resource constraints of a startup, make mistakes. Candidates put on their interview faces, sometimes feigning interest or exaggerating expertise. Bad hires are costly to startups, draining energy, momentum, and money. Some walk away with valuable intellectual property, trade secrets, or proprietary ideas.
If there is no alternative position in the venture for a mistaken hire, the entrepreneur must face up to it quickly and part company. The startup has no time to reprogram people.
Entrepreneurs should probe potential stakeholders carefully for fit. Established organizations already have a set of founders, board members, investors, customers, and vendors. The entrepreneur must decide who should be in each stakeholder set from the outset. These decisions can be crucial to future success.
Founders: Most people think of a solo entrepreneur when they think about startups, but often it is a partnership or founding team that launches ventures, as it was at DropBox, Google, H&M, and countless others.
Some entrepreneurs spend hundreds of hours on market research and prototyping but jump into partnerships with hardly any thought or scrutiny. They rely only on gut feeling, or they choose to work with their buddies or the first people who come along. Effectively, they are jumping into a marriage without dating. Instead, potential partners should ask hard questions: Is there a fundamental fit among the founding partners? Do they like, admire, and respect each other? Do they share a similar vision for the enterprise? Do they have compatible values and work styles? Can they be totally honest with each other? Do they have complementary skills? Do they agree about the exit plan?
Big problems occur when fundamental fit is missing.
Board Members: When forming the board of directors, entrepreneurs must determine the size of the board, the right balance between inside and outside directors, the working relationship between the board and management team, the frequency and length of board meetings, the number and type of board committees, the best person to serve as board chair, and board compensation. How engaged will the board be with the venture: will it be a passive, certifying, engaged, intervening, or operating board?4 At worst, a board can be a hassle and distraction, draining valuable time and injecting politics and turf wars into the venture. In many cases, a board is just a formality and does not add much value. At best, a board can be an invaluable asset to the venture, providing critical advice, mentoring, and oversight.
Investors: Entrepreneurs should also probe for fundamental fit among possible investors. Entrepreneurs should expect that venture capitalists and angel investors will perform extensive due diligence on them before investing, but many entrepreneurs do not turn the tables and sufficiently scrutinize potential investors. Angel investor and venture capital deals typically come with aggressive return-on-investment (ROI) expectations that require lucrative and fast exits (via mergers or IPOs). Entrepreneurs must weigh their investor options carefully, lest they find people in critical positions of power who diverge with them on fundamental issues. What is their expected ROI and time horizon? How involved will they be with the venture, including board seats? What is their reputation? Do they share similar values and a common vision for the venture? Entrepreneurs are wise to consider the strings attached to investment deals.
Customers: Some customers take advantage of startups, exaggerating their interest, delaying orders, or demanding extensive technical support and new bells and whistles. The best customers are early adopters willing to work with a startup, investing their own time and expertise to inform prototype and product development decisions. Not all startups have the luxury of being able to choose customers, but founders should recognize that not all customers are equal. Some come with heavy baggage and prohibitive costs. In some cases, entrepreneurs can reduce risk by diversifying their customer base, not becoming too dependent on a small number of customers.
Vendors: Founders should also scrutinize potential vendors for fit. Many vendors, especially large ones, are unsympathetic to the tribulations of a startup. Do they understand the venture's cash flow situation? Will they cut you off at a critical time when you most need components? Will they ship you second-rate material or skimp on technical support? Founders are wise to choose critical vendors only after extensive screening, then establish deep, open, and mutually beneficial relationships. They should outline what each party can expect and set up periodic senior management check-ins between the organizations to ensure alignment of interests and effective processes. Startups that take vendors for granted may not live to regret it.
Conscientious leadership practices can help entrepreneurs avoid that fate. Commit to create an organization that is built to last, not to flip. Purposefully shape a culture of character. Recruit for complementary skills and cultural fit, vetting your partners, employees, board members, customers, and vendors before working with them. Face up to it when you make bad hires. Make quick pivots. Passionately pursue your dream and make it reality.
