Empower your team to succeed
A diverse team standing as a team
How do Founders Empower Their Team to Succeed?
As a leader, you have to find the right balance between innovating and maintaining efficiency, especially in a startup. Startups are dynamic and it’s a very fine line between speed and total chaos. It demands clarity, trust, and the adapting to change.
Here is how I do it with the startups I work with:
Clear processes
Set clear goals: for the business, the teams and the individuals. It focuses effort and gives a sense of accomplishment. It also gives you a chance to develop skills. For startups, goals can change from one week to the next. Break the goals down to focus on small, short term achievement cycles which also help you have lighter and more regular performance evaluations.
Define roles and responsibilities: with clear roles and responsibilities, team members know the boundaries in which they can make decisions. For startups, team members often wear several hats. Have clear responsibilities for each of those hats. It accelerates decision making and provides better avenues to evaluate results.
Decision-making authority: With clear role boundaries, team members are free to operate within certain parameters. Trust them. Be available to help them make decisions, and share feedback but leave the decisions to them, after all they are the experts.
Clear behaviours
Open Communication and psychological safety: the more transparent the communication, the better-informed team members are. Requesting and offering feedback across levels of the business helps identify issues early and gives everyone a chance to grow. For startups, have light processes for anonymous feedback, and don’t skip 1:1 or reviews.
Provide training and resources: Help your team members develop new skills, and stretch them. For startups, time to learn is a good alternative to a training budget. Think of the Google 20% time or a day to work on a self-driven project.
Reward Success: This is probably the most important. Recognise individual contributions and team success, however small. Do it 1:1 and in groups, it creates a positive atmosphere and encourages everyone.
Review and adapt
Last, but not least: learn as you progress.
With goals and roles in place, you can see what works and what needs changing. As you scale, strategies and processes must change to remain efficient. Decide what is a good process review cycle for your business and expand this ritual to the whole organisation.
Balancing creativity and efficiency is critical to startups. It can be achieved by setting clear goals and enabling decision-making within each role. Along with communicating openly and transparently, it creates the structure required for team members to be autonomous and perform in their roles, thus giving the CEO the peace of mind that the organisation is on the right track.