Starting Well
I like the analogy proposed by Tomas Tunguz—nucleation. It is from chemistry (mostly) and is defined as the moment when something starts to form.
The beginning, when the DNA of a project is created. (Or the moment when you decide to reboot, reconfigure and relaunch).
It turns out that it matters, a lot, how things nucleate. As Wikipedia points out, nucleation is “often found to be very sensitive to impurities in the system.”
Start your company with no impurities? Reboot a couple of years in to identify impurities and begin to tackle them?
That’s a high bar, but “fewer impurities” is clearly better.
When starting a program, project, or organization, an impurity is usually an ambiguity—a question or quality left unsaid, unexplored, or untapped.
Here’s a checklist of things that leaders/starters/founders assume that everyone knows or that the group doesn’t need to discuss. But mostly, they don’t. And it does.
What exactly are we doing? What’s the vision? What’s the goal?
How do we know that we are succeeding? What is the benchmark? What are the key milestones?
What does high performance at work look like? Exactly?
What tools and practices will we use to share our work, monitor performance, and communicate graciously, efficiently, and effectively with each other?
What’s the deal? What do team members get, very specifically, for working hard here?
What standards of behavior and performance will I be held to? And what standards can I hold my boss/reports to?
How do we treat each other? How do we manage conflict, difference, pain?
How do we treat our customers/audience/clients/funders/investors? How do we surprise and delight everyone that comes in contact with us?
How do we talk about what we do? What’s our unique selling point?
This checklist not only might save you from future pain, but it is also generative—it promotes conversation and raises the bar on creativity and clarity about what you do, how you sell it, and how you know when things are going well (or when they aren’t). And, it gets your team on board in a way that telling and instructing does not.
So, why is this not step one? First, it’s much more fun to work on the product/program, and talk about all its virtues, and how many people it’s going to help, or how many units will sell. That’s what gets people into the room. The culture/performance conversation is less familiar.
And it can be seen as slightly hippie-dippy, too damn personal, or unsatisfying the last time that person was exposed to it. “Oh yeah, we had the culture and performance conversation at my last organization. That went nowhere.” The culture conversation hangover.
I say have it. No matter how tricky it feels, or resistant you and everyone else are.
Here are a few reasons why:
Successful organizations have a strong culture and performance ethic. As Peter Drucker is rumored to have said, “culture eats strategy for lunch.” Meaning that a high culture organization is more likely to pivot, retool successfully, and weather adversity, no matter what happens. Strategy is, well, just a plan and an approach. If you’re moving fast, it will change every few months anyway. A culture, well-maintained, can handle all sorts of weather.
You will have the culture and performance conversation eventually. Growth demands it. There’s a point at which organizations get big enough (more than two people?) that the human infrastructure part has to be addressed. Or even worse, your board will make you have the conversation, your funders will make you, or your investors will make you (and it’s usually because something is broken).
And nucleation can be fun. There is a toolbox on the internet (and on my hard drive) of checklists, exercises, and perspectives for performance enhancement and culture-building that are interesting, engaging, and amusing.
Start Well.