We are a startup
A few month ago, I was offered, with 3 other people, to take part in an experience : create an internal startup. We have more or less 3 months to identify a project, assess its potential ans build a first prototype. During this process, we are helped by the teams of different Parisian accelerators.
We are supposed to be the dream team if you look at our resumes: commercial, marketing, data science, innovation, development and project management. The only point is that we did not know each other before this project started.
The first main step of the project was then to really build a team. Here are some exercises we did on the firsts weeks to build the team.
I discovered after those team building phases the principle described in this article from Romain Champourlier and it appears that the exercices we did helped improve one or more of those areas needed to build cohesion in the team.
MBTI
MBTI is a well-known questionnaire designed to indicate psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. More information on wikipedia
This test helps to understand how you are working and how others are working to better understand each others. Ideally, this test is taken with a coach to help you interpret the results. If not possible, I would recommend reading detailed description to better understand the purpose of the test and its objectives not to over interpret it : its not because you have a profile that you will always act as described in the profile (especially when put under pressure which can happen in an entrepreneurship project).
Kick-off project team
As a consultant, I was often asked to work on short appointments. When you are starting short projects, you know you have not much time to build the team and you have to trust each other to make sure the project will deliver. In such situation, we used to organise a kick-off project teams.
Take some time at the beginning of the project to think at the following subjects and share the vision of everyone in the team :
- How did I understand the project and my role in the team
- What is the amount of our time I am able to dedicate to the project
- What are my concerns about the project
- What do I like in the project
- What disturbs me in the project
- What do I want to achieve on the project
- What do I wait from the project or the team
- How do I like to work
- What are my skills that can be helpful to the team
- What do I want to learn
- What are my professional and personal constraints
- What can help or disturb the team
- What are my questions to the team
The list of subjects has to be adjusted to fits the specificity of the team or the project but it helps start a trustful exchange among the team.
Detect the weaknesses of the team
It is important to know the weaknesses of the team to be able to prevent them from slowing the project. To easily detect them, we took a list of action verbs organized by themes (make initially to help job-seeker define their skills). Example here
We then made individually a mark in front of each verb describing a skill we though we had and each of us shared the 3 themas he mastered the most. It permits us to detect the skills we had or not collectively.
When a task regarding one of the less mastered skills come up, we are able to take more time dealing with it or to ask for help because we know we are not expert of it and may have a tendency to postpone it naturally.
Write a manifesto
Once you start to know what values your share among the team, you can start writing a manifesto to define what you want to achieve in this team, not the product bu how you want to transform people life with your future product. On our team, the manifesto was written before we even know what kind of product or service we wanted to provide but it helped us act as a team and build a common goal in our project.
Ask for feedback
We have the chance to have people around to help us in this project and, as external observer, they told us very quickly what the risks they saw in our team organization help us improve. They also offer to act as mediator and meet each of us individually to help express our concerns and avoid issues. Do not hesitate to ask for some help, if possible from someone trust by everyone to have some feedback and help in tension times.
