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Successful Teams
September 25, 2024
Properties of Successful Teams
- Build team for the long haul
- Team risk is real- do the people feel like they know each other? Do they trust that their teammates have the fundamental skills necessary to succeed?
- Positive and supportive communication
- Communication is open and accessible, avoid private chats, hidden networks, and rigid segmentation of teams
- Common goal- want the same thing and can return to this goal
- As a result, problems are resolved quickly
- Strong mutual support and very little blame
- People put the interests of the group above those of the individual
- Charlie Munger: “The right culture, the highest and best culture, is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people, correctly trusting each other.”
- The best way to find trustworthy people is to be trustworthy yourself
- Like recognizes/attracts/begets like
- Avoid behaviors that erode trust: not having humility to accept feedback, favoritism, conflicts of interest, inappropriate work relationships, etc.
- People with integrity do not engage in these activities which serve themselves rather than a higher goal
- Over time, if you are a giver instead of a taker, you will find that you will be successful
- Everyone is rowing in the same direction, not misaligned, actively pushing others down, clawing their way up the management ladder while funneling crap back down
- Something other than the startup/organization is holding the group together
- Arrive on time, be dependable
- Would each team member argue for why each other team member is essential to the team? Are they a “keeper”?
- 2 factors which energize people:
- Being around like minded and hard working individuals
- Being a part of something that’s clearly working really well
- Success teams have strong leadership culture
- Strong student leadership culture (Citrus Circuits)
- Strong entrepreneurial culture (Ramp)
- Strong product culture (Stripe, not hiring their first PM until 5 years in)
- Successful teams are often catapulted by an early success (Citrus Circuits “made the most unlikely run to Einstein” in 2013 after practicing at Ames w/ 254). The students were inspired.
- Companies and teams are not democracies. Utilize the informed captain model.
- Having a cofounder or co-director is immensely valuable. You are more effective and not alone.
- New members must be developed over time. Think about how long it takes for a software member to being effective and self-directed in FRC.
- Momentum is important: high momentum keeps a team motivated and achieving more than they expect that they can, while lost momentum is extremely difficult to obtain again.
- At a certain point, leaders transition from building a product to building a team that will thrive int the longterm.
- Team members at Ramp are often interested in more than one team/role. This results in them caring about many aspects of their team’s craft and putting effort in to understand and work with other roles. This curiosity and competence should be encouraged. I.e. design-minded engineers, PM-minded designers, engineering-minded PMs, etc. etc.
- The talent bar is high enough that there’s always a shortage of people relative to work needed to be done on other teams
- Price’s Law is par for the course. This law states that in any organization, half of the work is done by the square root of the total number of contributors. Is your organization above or below the curve?
How to Manage and Delegate
- What should you be doing? For managers: the things that nobody else on the team can do.
- Steps:
- Tell them what needs to be done. “Objectives” in OKR. Be clear about what result you want (not necessarily prescriptive in the how).
- Tell them why. Give them context.
- Tell them how to measure completion/success. “Key Results” in OKR.
- Set priority and get buy-in about whether or not someone believes it should be done at this time. Just because you need it to be done, doesn’t mean that they should do it.
- Clear the way. Make sure that they have the authority to get things done, and that people around them know that they have the authority to get it done.
- Check in on it and follow up.
- Constantly overseeing people’s work is micromanagement, the shadow of delegation. It doesn’t scale and people hate it.
- Signs that you’re micromanaging:
- You’re always frustrated with the output
- Steps to take if you’re micromanaging:
- You may need to change
- Your may have the wrong people in the role
- If deeper: there may be a values and goals misalignment
- If at this point, you must ask questions
- Why are we working on this?
- How do we want to do business?
- Are there things we do and don’t want to do?
- Remember, if you transition from being an individual contributor to being a manger, you are no longer directly responsible for the product. You are now responsible for the people who are responsible for the product.
Lessons from Stripe on a Culture of Excellence
- Hiring:
- Understand candidates deeply, frame the hiring process as an exploration of whether working on the team makes sense for them
- Hire with an organized and consistent methodology, going through aligned cycles. This way every there’s a standard process, each candidate is evaluated to a high standard, and you can understand their answers in the context of the batch
- Have a strong and defined mission, powerful missions attract people
- Operating principles:
- Company values are good, but it’s even better to assign operating principles which operationalize these values
- They’re derived from some success, and you can celebrate other team members with respect to how their success embodies an existing or new principle
- Talk about operating principles often
- Examples:
- Ramp: Move with velocity. Speed vs quality is a false dichotomy. Iterating quickly allows your product to become incredible.
- Ramp: Maximize your impact on the company’s business goals with your work. Impact may be immediate and obvious, or it may be a second or third-order consequence that compounds over time.
- Stripe: Be meticulous in your craft.
- Stripe: Customers first, understand your user. “Friction logging” is where you take a customer type which you know well, and you use the product from start to finish in their shoes. Take a note of any point of friction you encounter, and also highlight any successes
Rules for Building a Winning Team
- People don’t want to work with leaders who view them as “one of their workers”. We are all want to work with leaders who care about us and who we trust. Great leaders don’t go one or two layers deep in their relationship with their teammates as they would with any other acquaintance, they go 4, 5, or 6 layers deep.
- The single most important factor in building this relationship is the amount of one-on-one time spent with your teammate, where you are giving them your undivided attention.
- One of the most important metrics for measuring how successful you are at this is your organization’s retention rate. When people love working with your org, they stay.
- Is your team an environment where pulling a prank on a teammate would feel normal? If so, good. People should be laughing at meetings. Having a culture like this is the equivalent of “playing loose” in sports. Play the game you enjoy playing and not only will the game be more fun, but you’ll perform better too.
- Embrace friendly competition. Ex: have a holiday cubicle decorating contest. Find easy and fun ways to make the environment more competitive, it will drive your culture and teammates to be more focused and competitive in their work, come up with better ideas, and drive better results for your org. Not combative, just competitive.
- Use humor a lot. It makes people funner and tougher.
- Don’t force anyone into your culture. That’s why it’s called a culture fit. There’s nothing wrong with your org or with the candidate if they’re not a culture fit. Having a strong culture also makes the recruiting process self-selecting. People who do not fit will not be interested enough to join the team.
- Have some initiation process. Make people feel welcomed and a part of the team. This can be big or small. Make it fit your org’s culture.
- Recognize a teammate’s win, especially from the top. It’s one of the highest ROI ways to make teammates feel appreciated and successful. A CEO sending a message of praise on a Slack channel takes 20 seconds but goes a really long way to improve that one teammate’s experience as well as the experience of those around them.
- Pump up the collective, but recognize the individual. Some individuals are putting in more than others, and they should feel recognized. Treat everyone fairly, but not necessarily equally.
- Celebrate things together: a teammate’s last day, a teammate’s birthday, etc.
- Keep as even of a gender ratio as is possible and practical. Unless you’re in a very specific industry in which your company’s just inevitably going be driven by one gender, it’s really beneficial to have a good mix.
- Surprise your team. Bring food. Treat them to a dinner. Do something fun at a meeting.
- Get to know your teammates. What do they want? This builds trust, but also, you can’t make their dreams a reality if you don’t know what their dreams are. Know what your teammates’ want and you can incentivize them with it and steer the organization in the right direction for them.
- Have high standards and mutual accountability. Anyone can call out any one else (positively or negatively). This creates a culture of honesty and transparency, and allows people not in leadership positions to discover that they are leaders.
- “Teach your teammates your secrets so well that they could leave and become your competitor. But treat them so well that they don’t want to.”
- Same person, different culture/environment/teammates/role => different performance and enthusiasm.
Includes some points from the following talks: