Culture, Hiring, Growth. What Startups can learn from professional sport
A couple of months ago I’ve been giving a talk at The Family about building and leading rock-star engineering teams and especially about what startups can learn from professional sport. Here is the video of that talk:
And since it turned to be a hot theme to share more information in detail, I decided to write this article, including the core findings from the presentation.
First of all to share some more motivation behind this topic, the approach of learning from other industries I use quite often. Indeed, the industry of internet startups is younger than many other traditional ones and it means that many issues we are struggling with they probably already faced and successfully solved.
I like the professional American sport (especially NHL) and I’m aware more or less how the business side of it works. Some time ago I noticed that there’re a few master techniques we can learn from it. I’m talking about hiring, culture and professional growth.
What makes NHL teams similar to startups
There are a few core principles. Let’s have a look at it in details:
Salary cap
The Salary cap means the total amount of money that teams are allowed to pay their players. With no exceptions and no exemptions. Sounds like the worst nightmare of the European football clubs, isn’t it?
And the salary cap is exactly the tool, which dictates the rules of NHL. The amount of it is not an abstract value and is calculated as a percentage of the League’s revenue from the previous season. Brilliant idea! If League as a business generates more revenue, the salary cap growths. And vice-versa.
If we look at startups, all of us have this salary cap. Startups cannot pay gigantic salaries before reaching important milestones.
Teams cannot “buy” players but can sign free agents or perform trades
Same as startups. We cannot simply call the managers of another startup across the street and offer them a couple of millions for their best Senior Backend Engineer. Instead of it, we need to source talents.
Teams don’t have youth academies and can only draft prospects
In the universe of startups, we have the same. We either pay higher salaries to rock-stars or we sign talented juniors in order to grow rock-stars internally.
If players play better they want more
It is pretty natural. Just replace the word players with developers.
Limited time to win a cup
Altogether everything above makes a life of NHL managers creative. You need to think about the future, drafting young talents. You need to keep your current stars happy, but the salary cap limits your resources. You have to think about chemistry and you need to make the right decisions, because if you won’t win a cup this year, next year you may have to change half a team. And there’s always a risk to lose everything. Exactly like in the world of startups.
Hiring
This is how most fans want to see their favorite teams:
But unfortunately such an approach doesn’t work in reality and team managers aim to rather build something like this:
The usual NHL team needs:
- The stable goalkeeper #1.
- The backups goalkeeper who will be able to play 1/4 of a season, when the #1 is tired or injured.
- The stable and experienced defender.
- Another defender which will grow while playing next to the first one.
- The scorer. To actually score ;-)
- The center forward for both sides of the rink.
- The Russian. Because the Russian left and right wing players are always good ;-)
Now multiply it by four and adapt the concept based on the general goal of each five and you will get a standard NHL Team. Or on the other hand your own startup team, which consists of N scrum teams. Each of those scrum teams has:
- #1 QA or Test Automation Engineer, who is your last line of defense.
- Another QA to substitute #1 when he/she is tired, sick or on holidays.
- Backend developers/defenders: Senior, Mid-level and Juniors.
- Frontend developers, one of which may also know how the backend works, which helps to play on both sides of the rink.
In this way, that’s what we can learn from NHL in terms of hiring:
Do cherry-picking, hire one for others
Don’t just hire people because they have good skills. Keep in mind how a new team member will interact with already existing ones: will they help each other to grow, will they have conflicts and how it will change the effectiveness of the team.
Think about chemistry
Chemistry in sport is a topic, which definitely deserves a separate article or even scientific research. If you ever played any kind of football or hockey manager game, you know how important this characteristic of a team is.
Let’s take two chemical elements: Hydrogen and Oxygen. At standard temperature and pressure, both of them are gases, different but gases. But if we take two molecules of Hydrogen and one molecule of Oxegen, put them together and we’ll get water.
The same principle works for people. Two great hockey defenders may play two times better or two times worse while playing together. As same as two developers.
Team chemistry is a big factor in professional sport but in the world of startups, it is often underestimated. Don’t forget about it and get more from uniting the strengths of your team members.
Build a dynasty
A dynasty in sports is a team that dominates their sport or league for some length of time. And the building of it due to the salary cap is not that easy task.
Think two steps ahead and be creative while forming your startup dynasty. The core takeover here is no matter who joins or quits your team, it should stay successful.
Build a team not for yourself but for one who will replace you
Well, it doesn’t mean that someone necessarily has to, but the takeover from the previous point is valid here as well.
Make requirements transparent
If an ice hockey team signs a player, the manager makes it very clear what the team expects and how the player will be used. E.g. if someone is a good checker, no one sane will require from this player to score.
Unfortunately, this component is often missed in the startup world. Many companies don’t explain to their new employees what exactly they will do. Just a few generic words max. Something like, you will be our backend developer and will write PHP code. But even the PHP development within the same company could have different meanings.
Let’s have a look at two scrum teams, we have at Billie:
As you can see, these two Backend Engineering roles are very different and include slightly different working mode, tasks and the impact of mistakes. Such things should be clear already after the first interview with a candidate.
Everything mentioned above is valid for firing as well
Want to fire someone? Think about chemistry, impact, and dynasty.
Personal growth
This is Jaromir Jagr, two times Stanley Cup winner, and Olympic champion, who played in NHL between 1990 when he was 18 years old and 2018 when he was 46.
Impressive result and it was only possible due to his personal development plan, diet, and discipline.
The main learnings from professional sport are the following ones:
Spontaneous and planned growth
In my career, it happened a few times that I with one of my team members planned to reach certain personal development goals, but the ones we’ve reached have been totally different. And this is a classic example of a growth which was planned and a growth which actually happened and can be called spontaneous.
Spontaneous one is likely to happen because it is exactly what a person wants even if he or she doesn’t realize it yet. Therefore it is the responsibility of a team manager to predict where and how such spontaneous will take place and be ready for it.
Why? How? What?
The golden foundation of personal growth. Why do I want to become a better goalkeeper or frontend developer? How can I increase my GAA (Goals Against Average) score or decrease the number of bugs I produce? What training camps or online courses can help me?
Don’t hesitate to change the plan. Be agile
If a player doesn’t look good on the right wing, why don’t we try to move him to the center? If a QA Engineer is not motivated to learn Test Automation, what if we try to grow into the direction of Product Management.
Plants better grow up within the ecosystem
It is again one more time about chemistry, team building, and dynasty. Connect personal development plans of your team members between each other and they will help each other to grow.
Culture
This is an ice hockey team locker room. The place where team culture borns.
As same as with the spontaneous and planned personal growth, there are usually two cultures: the one established by managers and the one developed within the team. And the second one always exists even if it is not called like that. And it is especially valid for startups, where the decision of defining an official company culture is usually postponed.
The sport managers give a lot of freedom to their players inside the locker room. Players choose music, discuss game retrospectives and how to make it better, and even suggest to managers and coaches how to play next time. And it doesn’t make managers weaker. It makes them stronger because, in fact, they let the team define a team culture and when it is ready everyone benefits from it.
That’s why if you want to define your corporate culture firstly review the one which already exists within the team.
Conclusion
I don’t want to conclude, I want to continue!
The other resources, where you can learn more about the topic are the following:
- An article about the key components of team chemistry
- Another one about culture in the main dynasty in the salary cap era of NHL: Chicago Blackhawks.
- Or if you want to know more about Chicago Blackhawks’ success story there’s even a book.
And remember, while reading don’t think about hockey, think about your startup.
