Category: Corp Culture

Talent is one of the most important, and most difficult, aspects of a startup. The right person does make a huge difference. Just read the post last month from Joe Kraus, of Excite.com fame, titled If You Don’t Think You Need Greatness, You Haven’t Seen It where he talks about how people that haven’t worked with an amazing person with a particular skillset then view that position as one of lower importance. I’ve seen greatness first-hand and it’s helped me appreciate things I didn’t appreciate before.

Most of the time top talent isn’t actively looking for a position since they are in such high demand and their skills are well understood. One thing many talented people like to do is to meet with other talented people and share stories and experiences: enter the informational interview. An informational interview isn’t a full-on job interview but rather getting to know someone with the goal of understanding their background, skillset, and where they are in their career and personal goals. Think of an informational interview as regular getting to know someone new but with an eye towards possibly wanting to recruit them in the future.

Entrepreneurs need to do informational interviews on a regular basis.

Building a strong network on professional colleagues as well as a pipeline of talent is invaluable for entrepreneurs. Informational interviews should be a regular part of an entrepreneur’s life.

What else? What are some other thoughts on informational interviews in startups?

Once a startup finds a repeatable business model and gets out of the seed stage, they then enter early stage (e.g. 20 – 50 employees) before (hopefully) moving on to growth stage (50+ employees). With five employees in a startup everyone wears multiple hats and things are so crazy the topic of career paths don’t often come up. As the startup matures into a business and the next 20 people are hired, more specialization sets in and the topic of career paths becomes a bit more common. By the growth stage, career paths are a normal part of the conversation.

Startups have an especially difficult time answering the career path question.

With all the uncertainty of a startup who knows if it will even be around in a year or two. High end strategy consulting firms like Bain and McKinsey have the motto “up or out” which basically means you’re promoted every two to three years or you’re fired, and that works for that world. For startups, no matter how hard you try, everyone on the team isn’t going to be so entrepreneurially-oriented that they love the feeling of not knowing what’s next.

Here’s how we approach the career path question in a growth stage startup:

• Once or twice a year we sit down and talk with each person about career path options (we don’t do annual performance reviews but we do do quarterly check-ins that are simplified reviews)
• We emphasize that with company growth comes new opportunities, teams, departments, etc but that we don’t have a firm timeline
• As a philosophy, we want to promote from within whenever possible
• Team members are encouraged to identify opportunities or challenges that excite them and we work on how to make them achievable

Career paths are tough for early stage startups. It’s best to tackle them head on and look for ways to be open and transparent with team members while also getting them excited about the potential opportunities and changes that lie ahead.

What else? What are some other ideas around career paths for startups?

Team players in a startup get me excited, really excited. A team player is someone who isn’t afraid to take on projects or start new initiatives outside their roles and responsibilities. In the baseball sense, it’s like a utility player who is an active self-starter. With so many moving parts and lack of resources in a startup, these team players are invaluable.

Here are a few examples of team players that take initiative in a startup:

• Bringing ideas to the table, like the introduction of a new employee benefit, and spearheading the selection of a vendor and roll out of the new service
• Identifying a need in the startup, like on boarding and training of new employees, and volunteering to head it up
• Recognizing a hassle, like internal conference room scheduling, and finding a solution for it without prompting

Part of being this type of team play is having the “can do” attitude as well as awareness of what’s going on around them. Team players that take the initiative are invaluable in a startup.

What else? What are some other aspects of team players that take the initiative in a startup?

Finding the right co-founder for a startup is one of the more difficult tasks. It isn’t that there aren’t great people that want to go to war with you, rather, getting your co-founder right is one of the most important things you’ll ever do in a startup, right up there with choosing an awesome market, and timing things well. I’m a fan of two total co-founders, sometimes three, but only if everyone really adds significant value.

Here are some characteristics to look for in a co-founder:

• An owner mentality (e.g. ask how comfortable they are to go without pay or sign a personal guarantee on a line of credit)
• A skill set that complements the other co-founder (e.g. technical, business acumen, marketing, etc)
• Aligned personal, professional, and family values — this can be tough, but values hold a team together during the toughest of times
• Personality fit whereby it’s someone that you’ll look forward to spending a significant amount of time together

A co-founder is one of the most important decisions of a startup and should not be taken lightly. Spend as much time with the person, even working on projects, before jumping in. With the right co-founder, the startup experience will be that much better.

What else? What are some other co-founder characteristics to look for in a startup?

Recently I started reading Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler, published in 1993. The author was born in Brazil, the son of Austrian immigrants, and inherited his father’s manufacturing business, Semco, at an early age. Not liking the traditional workplace style after several years of stress, Semler set out to build the most democratic environment.

Here’s what the book publishers labeled the most radical ideas in 1993:

• No dress code
• No secretaries
• Workers set their own salaries (based on budgets and department profitability)
• Required vacation time

It’s interesting to look back nearly 20 years and see three of the four highlighted items as things that are pretty commonplace today. 20 years from now I wonder what will be common in the workplace that’s considered radical today.

What else? What are some other major changes in the workplace over the past 20 years? What’s going to be normal 20 years from now?

Continuing with yesterday’s post Self-Actualization as a Startup Outcome, I wanted to highlight a few more items from the book Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow by Chip Conley. The author does a great job adapting Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs into a simplified form for employees, customers, and investors. I believe that employees come first, as he states as well, especially since everything starts there. Yes, you need cash from customers to pay the bills but long-term success is driven by putting employees first.

Here are the three pyramids outlined by Chip Conley:

Employee Pyramid

•   – Meaning –
•  — Recognition —
• — Money —

Customer Pyramid

•   – Meets Unrecognized Needs –
•  — Meets Desires —
• — Meets Expectations —

Investor Pyramid

•   – Legacy –
•  — Relationship Alignment —
• — Transaction Alignment —

As you can see, what people normally think of for each category is really just the basic foundation to be in the game, and everything else builds on top of that.

What else? What are your thoughts on the employee, customer, and investor pyramids from Peak?

Recently I started reading Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow by Chip Conley after a friend of mine sent it to me in the mail unannounced. Chip Conley is the founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, which is one of the largest boutique hotel firms in the country. I had the opportunity to meet Chip in 2006 at a Baltimore conference on delivering great experiences where he talked about the importance of corporate culture and employee development. At the time, I didn’t believe in corporate culture as the guiding principle, as I do now, but I remember Chip as being thoughtful and engaging.

In the book Peak, Chip articulates my shared belief that companies are one of the best vehicles possible to change the world for the better by helping employees achieve their full potential at work and in life. Wikipedia defines self-actualization from writer Abraham Maslow as the following:

The desire for self-fulfillment, namely the tendency for him [the individual] to become actualized in what he is potentially.

Much like startups are a vehicle to build community leaders, startups are also vehicles to help people maximize their potential and really push the limits of their capabilities, in a good way. Startups, unique from many other work environments, empower employees to wear different hats and work on a wider range of projects when compared to a traditional company. This exposure, and the corresponding challenges, increases the likelihood that the team member will find what they enjoy doing, stretch them to get better, and result in more self-fulfillment. It doesn’t always work out, but for people it does, the startup helps in their self-actualization journey.

What else? What are some other ways self-actualization can be the outcome of a startup?

@melonakos tweeted a link earlier today to The Culture Myth where the author covers a number of importants points about corporate culture. Corporate culture is a part of life in all companies. Some companies embrace it, talk about it, care about it, and actively work to improve it. Most companies do little about corporate culture and let it manifest itself in an unintentional manner.

The strongest corporate cultures are cared deeply about by the founders from the early days with formal and informal efforts to make the best culture possible infused throughout everything the startup does. A strong corporate culture doesn’t mean it’s the best culture for all companies, but that it’s the best culture for that one specific company — one that passionately believes in it and works to make it great.

It’s extremely hard to retrofit an existing company that hasn’t had a strong, cohesive culture from the start. It can be done but plenty of people will have to be fired, incremental changes will need to be made to processes, and the reorienting to focus on culture needs extensive buy-in. If front-line team members care about culture and the executive doesn’t, the culture won’t be strong. The founders and executives need to care deeply about the culture for it to be strong.

What else? What are some other reasons a strong corporate culture must be cared deeply about by the founders?