Emakase had a wonderfully insightful conversation with Mr. Pham Trung Hung, Chief Advisor at PNA Consulting and our partner in People Management. The interview provided many invaluable lessons on recruiting your startup team and how to make sure you get to your destination. Read on to find out more about the perfect startup team, recruitment blindspots, and more.
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The most important characteristic of a startup team, I would have to say, is the personality of everyone and how they handle personality differences working together. Since everyone has distinct personalities, conflicts and frictions will always arise when those personalities come together. In fact, most conflicts or differing opinions arise from the existence of individual characters and different thinking habits. So I think if a startup can achieve harmony between those differences, it would be a very significant advantage.
One of the first blindspots that I can immediately think of is people’s tendency to look for talented members, expecting that talented people will work well together. Talent here refers to their expertise.
When a startup is at its first stages, the founder tends to think that they need to recruit very talented people, without considering how these people will work with each other. In reality, a lot of talented personnel tend to be very protective of their opinion, since they know they’re good at what they do. But in a team, they think only of their performance and not to build success together.
This also leads to another blindspot that teams must be mindful of when recruiting. These new members could be very talented and are experts at their job, but it’s necessary to understand that they shine only in their previous environment, in their past. Whether they will continue to shine in a new environment, is an entirely different question that we often forget. In a new environment, working with a new product, a new service, a new team and new workflow, will they continue to thrive in this setting?
There have been numerous case studies of startup teams failing despite being very talented. Members disagree or can’t stand each other, personnel changes, it all comes down to people not being able to adapt to each other in a new environment.
If we look at the big picture, it is not only startup teams that are faced with difficulties working together but also teams in any other business contexts.
The first and foremost issue, as always, is communication. We talk to each other without really hearing or understanding each other due to differences in communication styles and languages.
A second issue comes up when leaders set KPIs without accompanying or guiding their team members in achieving those goals. When failure inevitably creeps up, they criticize their members with questions like “Why have you failed this task” or “Why did you not notify me when you are struggling”, not realizing their own failure in supporting their members and anticipating their ability to complete the tasks.
A third aspect deals with the emotional side of teamwork, which is very often overlooked. When people in a team cannot work together and face conflicts, many times, they are not calm enough to deal with the differences rationally. Instead, they bring the story out of its professional context and into a personal setting, turning it into personal vendettas. This inevitably leads to one or more team members having an emotional outburst and results in the demise of the team.
A final point is the trust factor. Although this matters for all teams, it plays a particularly essential role for startup teams. Understand that startups are, in essence, organizations operating on the basis of a belief in the future. The road to the future is perilous and hazy, while everyone in the team walks on blindfolded. It requires an immense amount of trust to stay on that road when nobody knows where it is leading. All it takes is one spark of doubt for the domino chain to fall. As someone questions the meaning or results of their job, others will start distrusting each other, getting caught up in feelings of doubt and confusion. In turn, this affects their performance and the outcome of the startup, which, again, affects their emotions. If the startup team does not have enough trust binding them to each other, that team is almost destined to fail.
There have been many studies about how a perfect startup team would look, but personally, I don’t believe in a golden formula in building a team, as there are always too many potential variables for each team.
With that said, there are certain qualities that make it more probable that a team could survive, the first of which is their ability to talk to each other. Any good team must be able to deal with each other’s emotions and address their concerns in a productive manner. Of course, it is unavoidable that conflicts or difficulties will arise, placing a significant challenge on the team leader. However, if the leader’s frustrations at these difficulties are not resolved properly, it will affect not only themselves but also the team’s morale.
Personality wise, many studies have pointed out the necessary characteristics in a successful startup team. One of them stands out to me, which stated that there is a similarity in all successful startup teams, and that is their “grit”. “Grit” can be defined as the resilience, perseverance and the ability to bounce back after failures. This is more than just a quality but also a discipline to keep startups going forward.
Remember that the first stage of a startup, the Dream phase, is a time of dopamine outburst. At this stage, everything is beautiful, you have the next billion-dollar-idea in your hands and the team is high and blinded on dopamine. But as the business goes into operations, the team confronts their first difficulties, dopamine levels lower, people will start to be discouraged. At this point, whichever team is most resilient, has the most grit, that team has more chances of making it through. There are techniques that a leader could use to build up their team’s grit, but these techniques require a careful understanding of the team’s strengths and weaknesses.
Overall, in the startup world, the grittiest teams are the ones with the highest chance of survival, and survival is already halfway to victory. Among 100 startups, if 99 close down, the last one standing is not necessarily the most talented one, but it is the grittiest one, and thus, the last one standing.
In the startup race, there is no first one to the finish line, there is only the last one standing.
