8 things that founders wished they’d known before

The overlooked success factor

Every founder will agree, if your?product?isn’t accepted by its user base or it is out-competed, then your startup will fail. If you don’t manage?funds?sufficiently and have bad marketing, it is also doomed. Having no clear business plan, getting into legal challenges, pivoting badly, taking bad (strategic) decisions will cause your startup to fail just the same.

There are hundreds of great business books out there, all focusing on how to run a successful business and developing your so-called hard skills and how to succeed.

What we are describing here may all sound clear and obvious, but when you are in the thick of it as a founder, bootstrapped with 1000 things to do, it can be hard to keep your head above water and stay focussed.

But there are essentials that often get overlooked.

We are talking about?team, culture?and?soft skills,- better known as power skills.

When you are founding a company, the people you surround yourself with are vital to your success. Together with the right team, you can tackle challenges that the startup world throws at you.

Simon Sinek ?once said: ‘there is no such thing as soft skills’. There are hard skills you can learn and HUMAN skills you need to train.

When we speak to founders we often hear things like:

‘Everyone can communicate.’

‘We have a good culture by nature already, never change a running system.’

‘My employees are real startup people, they go the extra mile — every day without me asking for it.’

‘Training? Soft skills? Personal development? Maybe later — no time and no money right now.’

But it’s not just your business plan, product/service or funding that could kill your startup, it’s also to do with you and your team. If you don’t approach hiring as a strategic topic, you are missing out. If you don’t manage your team well, communicate with intention and purpose and form and foster your culture, your company is equally doomed.

The good news is that we are also starting to see a shift in the mindset of founders who really believe that their teams are their greatest asset to success. If you want to be part of a more ‘human-centric’ revolution, we’ve got you covered.

For starters, follow these 8 steps when you form your culture, team and soft skills:

Step 1: get your vocabulary right

Cultural statements

Cultural statements are formulated claims, which depict your culture from various perspectives. They are there to enable your employees to do their jobs and help them understand what they can expect in return. No company is like any other and everyone has different requirements. But there are some basic cultural statements from which you can pick and choose as you see fit for your company.

Here are the most essential ones:

Vision statement

This is the cornerstone of your company and describes how the world looks if your company is successful. Vision statements are aspirational. They are meant to inspire by painting a picture of a future worth working towards.

A good vision statement is short, simple, specific to your company and leaves nothing open to interpretation. For example:

LinkedIn: ‘Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.’

Mission statement

You know best how you want to reach your vision. So, make it a founders′ matter to formulate the mission statement. This is also a crucial element to have early on for defining and shaping your culture.

A mission statement is a guideline by which you operate. Everything you do as a company should work towards your mission. For example:

Google: ‘To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’

Purpose

You can make it explicit in a written purpose statement, but most companies have included it in their mission statement. This is a ‘nice to have’ in an explicitly communicated way but it might only confuse people. The important thing is that you are clear on the purpose in your head. For example:

Unicef: ‘To work with others to overcome the obstacles that poverty, violence, disease and discrimination place in a child’s path.’

Values

Every single person in your company has their own personal values. The ones that everyone in your company shares and agrees on are the ones driving the business by guiding the team to make decisions and behave correctly. Because they are such effective guidelines for the hiring process as well as a great figurehead for the outside world, it makes sense to make them explicit and communicate them in writing. Unlike the vision, mission and purpose of your company, the values might not exist in your head before founding your startup. They might have to ripen with your early team and develop before being outlined. Therefore, it makes sense to involve your initial team. For example:

Coca Cola:

Leadership: Have courage to shape a better future;

Collaboration: Leverage collective genius;

Integrity: Be real;

Accountability: If it is to be, it’s up to me;

Passion: Committed in heart and mind;

Diversity: As inclusive as our brands;

Quality: What we do, we do well;

Photo by?Clay Banks ?on?Unsplash

Step 2: activate your long term thinking muscle

The world of business evolves around ideas. Companies’ lives are to a great extent dependent on the founder’s ability to think long term.

When a company is freshly founded the team almost drowns in their areas of responsibility and their workload. It’s easy to think short term, to put a band-aid over a problem and move on quickly. Because time is ticking and money is slipping through one’s fingers, productivity needs to be at its maximum.

Not everyone is able to think long term, about the distant future and the impact your company and your product will have on this world. The latter point is why it is so important that founders can connect people to their idea and their cause, engage them, excite them, while always having the long term goal in mind.

This being said, long term thinking is all about two things: the vision and the purpose. A company’s purpose is what sort of problem it aims to solve, what sort of solution it offers, but also what kind of company it should be for its employees — in the long term!

In the rush of the day to day business, it is normal to reactively fight fires and quickly jump to the “band aid-solution”, just to keep going. But train your long term way of thinking and evaluate your decisions consciously in regards to the values and the purpose all the time — until you MAKE them consciously.

Step 3: find the right team

Take some time to reflect on what kind of (starting) team you want and need. It depends on your product or service of course, your location, your market, but also your personality and values as a founder. The intuitive question you will ask yourself is: What kind of skills do I need initially?

That’s a great start. You might even want to consider writing a personnel plan covering your needs 6 months in advance.

But equally important is the question: What kind of people do you want to surround yourself with for the major part of the day — and maybe the night? And here is the tricky part: of course you want to spend your working days with people who are just like you. It is only human to want to be amongst like-minded people, who motivate you and follow your path and cheer you on because they all think the same way as you do. BUT mind the important differences. You need to take the first step towards becoming a leader and growing into your role as CEO, founder or leader by not only allowing but even encouraging diverse ways of thinking. Ask to be challenged and give your team the space to develop and nurture their own ideas. In the beginning, there are usually no processes, no workflows set in stone, yet. You need to experiment and find out what works best for your company. That is only possible when you have people around you, who dare to question your decisions and challenge you to consider other options now and then — in other words: you need startup-savvy people, who are able to think like an entrepreneur themselves. As a nice side effect, you will grow even more into the role of a great leader by accepting critique and living a multi-facetted and diverse culture, in which everyone respects everyone’s opinion and learns to listen actively and to collaborate in a fruitful manner.

Step 4: put your ‘vocabulary’ into action

Involve your core team in bringing your culture to life. You could consider your very first employees being your “cultural co-founders” anyway. They will shape your culture just by being there and collaborating and behaving the way they do, no matter what. So, why not make use of this early passion and drive of the team and the blank cultural sheet your company still is (to a certain extent after all) by involving them actively. In this way, you not only gain a strong and motivated workforce for this matter, helping you to establish the culture actively and with the best interest for the company. But you also indirectly motivate your team and make them emotional stakeholders of your culture and your company. They will fight for your culture and will do anything to make it and your company a success.

Step 5: set the path and the pace

5.1 provide focus

Of course the above can only be fruitful when everyone runs into the same direction and has the same goal, the same vision. Your goal, and your vision!

So, we need to curb the drive mentioned above a little bit and add to it a clear side fence, once the core culture is defined.

5.2 Passion and accountability

Focus is nothing without the passion to get to action and a clear sense of accountability within each one of your team members. Needless to say, it is not enough to be passionate about the cause yourself. You need to show it and stand by your decisions and actions. Further, implement a deep sense of accountability within your team as well. Otherwise, their passion will spread everywhere like fireworks and when mistakes are being made (which they inevitably will) no one takes the responsibility and passionately blames everything or anyone else. Accountability goes along with responsibility on their end and trust on yours. While responsibility can be given, e.g. for a project or a team, accountability needs to be “taken” and felt. It depends on the commitment and the acceptance of this accountability. How? Here we go again, stressing at the importance of hiring the right people. Once you know how they think and work, you start trusting them and you can let go bit by bit by giving them more responsibility while making them aware of the trust you put in them and the accountability you expect them to take. Feeling accountable means that your employees will act in your company’s best interest

5.3 Solution oriented mindset

A focused, passionate and accountable team is a great start. But what happens, when problems arise or mistakes happen? You need problem solvers around you, better yet people with a solution oriented mindset. That, however, is a commonly underestimated personality trait, some people simply have and others are well advised to train. But a solution oriented mindset is more than just an attitude to always look for solutions in every situation. It is a way of living.

There are some key features all solution oriented people have in common. They always find a way, they never give up, they question the status quo and have a natural need to answer the why question. They are passionate, confident, content and at ease with the world as they are completely resting in themselves. How? Find solution oriented people around you and make them your inspiration, mentors or idols. Start a conversation with them and learn from them.

And while you are working on yours, provide an environment for your team to develop theirs as well. It is not only healthy and sustainable, it will also benefit your company.

Would you like a head start to your conversation with your future role model? Here are some tips for you to develop your solution oriented mindset:

• use critical thinking, make it a habit to question everything
• take every obstacle, problem and failure as a chance to learn and grow
• stay positive, keep the can-do attitude
• play around with possibilities (the ‘what if?’ game)
• train and apply emotional intelligence
• leave the victim role

Photo by?Neil Thomas ?on?Unsplash

Step 6: keep talking to each other

This also sounds so easy ‘just keep talking to each other’, but within this harmless notion lie the pitfalls of good communication. Sometimes, hearing certain information at a wrong time or from a wrong person or even through a wrong channel can be enough to trigger mistrust and bad feelings. Yes, communication is a personal and subjective matter, but it does not mean you can not learn how to do it successfully for any type of person, taste or matter.

Communication is the biggest issue at hand but there is more you can take care of to make sure your team gets along, while having fun making your dream a reality in a productive way (and why would you not want that, right?). The magic words are team alignment. Engage with your team regularly and make them not only see your vision, mission and goal as clearly as you do. But make them also want to reach this goal.

You are responsible for people’s jobs now, the food on their families’ tables depends on you. It can be a heavy burden but it can also be great pleasure to know what good you are actually doing. So, here’s to you taking accountability by making sure the team is acting and, more importantly, feeling as one.

Step 7: introduce simple rules and initial tools

Since Netflix CEO Reed Hastings introduced a ‘no rules’ culture at Netflix and wrote a book about it along with business professor Erin Meyer, scientific interest has increased, and other companies have tried to copy their approach.

Of course, you can draw inspiration from it and keep rules in your company to a minimum. But experience has shown, that in the chaotic and turbulent times of a young startup, you definitely need some rules in order to get some structure and order in the way your team works. If you think using the word RULES will put people off, think of another word to encompass The Way We Do Things Around Here, or something that you come up with yourself.

Believe us, you will know when it is time to introduce a rule for something. When you do, write it down, store it in a central place where everyone can review it at any time and communicate it to your team officially. The collection of rules will grow with you and they will need to be adjusted as you go. This way they are there without too much effort and on demand. However, only keep the essential ones to help with your development at any given time.

When it comes to tools:?without some basics in place, your team will inevitably start using their own tools and systems. They will communicate and collaborate in ways they picked up from previous companies using what methods and channels are the most convenient for them. Once habits get established, they spread quickly. By then, it’s extremely hard to establish common ways of communicating and collaborating and the last thing you want is to find yourself having to force everyone to use the same tools in the same way when they have got used to doing it in a way that suits each of them individually. For example, streamlining everyone into using a common naming convention and folder structure in one single data management tool becomes a change management project that distracts people from their core tasks.

Simply use the search engine to find the tools and systems best suited for your demands. You can start?here .

Step 8: take precautions against burn out

Building a startup is much like running a marathon, with crazy sprints in between. It’s fun and rewarding. But it takes dedication, stamina and the notion of how to balance yourself as well as your team out. Cutting your losses and redirecting your energy are essential when starting your own business. And you need to be able to maintain this mindset and the power over the next couple of years. You need to distribute your energy among your own workload and your team. Because sometimes, they will need you to re-energise them, redirect them and re-motivate them, thus reminding them of their purpose and the overall goal once in a while. Don’t underestimate the energy you need to pour into your work being a leader, networking, learning new things but also to work with your team, hire the right people, etc. Because the stronger your team is, the better you can share responsibilities and regain energy from them too in the future if necessary. Because even if a project has survived for several years, founders may face the insidious problem of burn out, when after years of dedication and energy poured into the company, they don’t feel like they have the same amount of energy or creativity anymore.

There are solutions for this, or better yet: precautions you can take before it’s too late. Even if right now, this seems so very unlikely and you feel invincible. When it’s starting to affect you, it’s too late, because at that moment, you don’t even care to do anything about it anymore.

I don’t want to scare you. I am sharing this with you simply because I want to stress the importance of precautionary measures when it comes to psychological problems, such as burn out. That is the reason for us to take those first steps in culture and team — to be prepared for problems of any kind and prevent things, which could harm you and your business.

Photo by?Ben White ?on?Unsplash

Sidestep: get support

If you struggle with any of those first steps, don’t panic! It’s not your job to be an expert. But it is your job to find one.

You can choose from a fast variety of Consultants, Coaches, Mentors, Trainers, Agencies as well as Platforms, Apps and Online-Tools to get external expertise in any field into your company, so also in the area of team and culture.

If you ever wondered what the difference between all those titles is, here it comes:

Consultant:

A Consultant provides you with all information and solutions. She is an expert in a certain field and consults you on what you should do about a certain issue.

Coach:

A Coach supports you in finding your own answers. If you can’t find any, she will also suggest solutions from her experience, but she is rather an expert in finding a solution than in knowing the solution. Coaches usually help in personal development matters.

Mentor:

A Mentor is someone who is professionally working in your required field of expertise. She is knowledgeable and experienced and can guide you to become successful in general in this area faster.

Trainer:

A Trainer leads you strategically. This means, she trains you in operative, tactical or strategic matters. You actually do it and get guidance and feedback from her. Think of language or sport trainers.

No matter which kind of external support you choose, make sure to create a list of your requirements and conditions beforehand and know your budget and goal. Communicate and agree on them with the expert of your choice before signing any contract. Keep track of the progress and be upfront and transparent about your expectations at all times during your collaboration. Don’t be shy to give feedback. It is your time, your money and your success in the end.

Conclusion

Now, take a step back and look at how far you’ve come in your mind already. What perceptions have changed? What do you see differently already, now that you have started to immerse yourself in the field of team and culture? Whatever you think, I ask you to not fall into the trap of thinking of it as a ‘soft skill’ area anymore, which takes care of itself and can run on the side or be ignored.

If you want to know more about the secret success factors for every startup, stay tuned for the release of our book Culture Up (pre-orders start this week).