Let me introduce you to Mark Levine and Michael Dublin. They were two guys with a simple, but powerful idea. They dreamed up a service for discount razors that you could have delivered right to your doorstep. It was an inexpensive and convenient solution for a need that most of us have. They founded the company dollar shave and what's started, as a simple idea turned into an almost overnight sensation. After a hilarious online ad caught social media fire, the founders discovered they had almost bitten off more than they could chew. The company took off so quickly, they could barely keep pace with demand. They were literally printing trash bags full of mailing labels and throwing them over the wall of their distributing warehouse late at night just to keep orders moving. Other startups aren't quite so lucky. You could just as easily find yourself crashing quickly, running out of funding and scrambling just to keep the lights on. In this fast paced environment, it can feel like all of your waking hours need to be focused on getting work done. You might wonder how it's possible to find any capacity to pay attention to your team's interpersonal relationships, but here's a thing. You still have to do it. In my own work, I've talked a lot with entrepreneurs and one thing I hear all the time is that having a good cohesive team is at least as important if not even more important than having a great idea for product or service. The reason is that the good ideas happens all the time. What separates out successful companies is the ability to implement them and that's where having a great team comes in. The key with a startup team is that since you often can't spend lots of time doing corporate retreats, you should create check points for adjusting your team dynamic. In a startup or really on any time where time pressure is your biggest concern, these checkpoints help you stay focused, without totally losing sight of team chemistry. There are three types of checkpoints in particular that you should consider making. The first is what you might call an engagement checkpoint. Startups can be risky and it's important to establish with your team members moments when you agree to check in on their level of involvement in your venture. The specific milestones depend on their interests. For example, if you hire a young employee as the administrative assistant who eventually wants to work on coding software, you might create a six-month checkpoint to discuss whether or not it looks like that opportunity while actually open up to them. You should also create problem checkpoints that allow you to slow down from time to time and raise the yellow flag, so to speak. That's a term used by Jeremy Bloom, an athlete turned entrepreneur who described his own startup experience in the book Fueled By Failure. Bloom and his partner had a tough time agreeing on what risks to take and their strategy for growing their company called Integrate. Jeremy was the more cautious of the two and he felt like his partner would often plow ahead, even when he was uncomfortable with the decision they were making. When Jeremy finally had enough of feeling like his input was being ignored, he came up with a rating system for what he called yellow flags. When the partners had to make a big decision, they would put a number on their level of discomfort from one to ten. Sometimes Jeremy might say, this one's an eight for me and we need to reconsider. Simple ideas like Bloom's comfort scale or even just having a 15 minutes stand up meeting when there's a big decision are quick ways to make sure that your surfacing disagreements, even when your team is moving at a fast pace. You should also agree to pivot checkpoints. A pivot in the startup world is that moment when you realize you need to make a significant change in strategy, either because something about your product or idea works really well and you need to emphasize it or because it's failing and you need to go in a different direction. Consider Ben Silbermann who left his job at Google to go full-time into developing his idea for a shopping app called Tote. Tote failed to catch on for the most part, except for one minor feature that users were really crazy about. It was an option to pin and share products they loved with their friends. Silbermann made the pivot and relaunched his product with that single feature at its core. The site was called Pinterest and just two years after it's launched, it was drawing 20 million unique visitors per month while being pegged with a $1.5 billion evaluation. To make this type of pivot, you have to have a checkpoint that triggers reassessment of your goals and strategy. It could be a certain sales figure, a customer satisfaction score or some internal metric like a vote on your strategy. Then just as important, determine the timeline for persevering or pivoting based on those metrics. As you can see, the startup life can be a real roller coaster ride and it can often feel like you have to move way too fast to focus on managing team relationships. Since you don't really have a choice on startup teams or on any team where time is tight, focus on creating built-in checkpoints that trigger discussions about your group dynamic.
