“You need to slow down, look back, and reflect on your experiences”
Shaun Johnson, co-founder of the Startup Institute, talks about how they help their students develop soft skills and why culture is so hard to manufacture in startups.
Hi Shaun! Thanks for taking the time to chat. So what made you start the Startup Institute?
It started out of needs that I saw working at Techstars. I met some of the most entrepreneurial and innovative teams in the world and they raised a lot of money there. With raising that type of money comes expectations for future growth, that often means you have to scale your team and doing that incredibly fast, something that might happen with big growth, often leads to bad decisions.
You often make those decisions based on corporate practices, like looking at resumes, looking at what school they went to or what company they’ve worked at. And often you get it wrong with respect to culture fit and how you evaluate people in general in that stage is the roots of your culture. So that chance to really dissect that problem and design a solution around it was the genesis from a company standpoint.
Do you think startups in general think about culture?
I think it’s a matter of mental resource. When you’re facing an opportunity to get so many things done, what a startup is all about, you just want to execute and execute. Just keeping your head down. Depending on your corporation you might forget about culture and implicitly say that why we do things aren’t as important as what we do. It’s also important to think about the people you bring in and how they add to the culture in ways that might further it. They might come in and change it and maybe completely put you at an 180° compared to how the founders envisioned the culture, purpose, mission, visions and values of the company. That might not be a bad thing, but just being aware of it is important.
On your website you mention a lot about developing a mindset in your students. What does that mean?
When you look at the median student it’s someone who’s had life experience and made decisions that intersect with how they make a living and how they make a life. They might’ve felt that their job wasn’t worth it and have taken some time off to really self-explore and figure out their lives. So we work with and build off an emotional narrative and many people come to us to accelerate their career or gain skills that our innovation economy demands. So it’s about being able to slow down that thought and think about why you’re doing something.
How do you do that in the program?
It’s about prompting people and ask them:
- What does it feel like to work in a company you love?
- What doesn’t it feel like?
- How do you think about the way communication happens within your company?
- How do you interact with your boss?
- With your peers?
- How does conflict happen?
- How does it get resolved?
I think just being able to look back, slow down and reflect on what good and not so good experiences look like and what your sense of values are. And just think about how those values are reflected in others and in the organization helps us to ingrain that emotional intelligence in everything that we do.
So it’s a reflective practice?
Yes, and it’s very circumspect. And in regards to communication we talk about what that looks like and help you assess what your communication style is but also how to quickly see what it looks like in others.
Do you have a framework for that type of assessment?
Absolutely, we see them as colors and it ends up being like this shared language inside of the Startup Institute. But it’s really meant to understand people. For example if a blue person and a red person have an email conversation the red person just want to know what to do, they don’t want the whole journey up until the action. And the blue person might feel differently and want to give them that whole story. So it’s about giving people a context that drives empathy for the person they’re communicating with and getting them to be aware of their own style so they can make an active decision on how they change the way they communicate so their message can be delivered, heard and accepted in the right way.
What’s the reaction from the students?
It’s all in how you deliver the training, and I think that’s kind of a hidden art. A lot of folks are not in tune with emotional intelligence, communication and other soft skills. But the most important skill is just that, the soft skills, and thinking about how you operate within an organization. And the way we normally talk about them in organizations are like they’re just gravy. So a lot of the time you find that people are dismissive of it. But the way that we bring it together is that it’s always integrated with the hard skills that we teach.
Could you elaborate a bit on that?
Sure, so we show them how it actually works and translates into career success. We deliver statistics or actively bring the learning into the experiences we create. So we might ask them to describe their first job or tell us about a time where they felt at their best. Even here we can put that against the color wheel. By doing that we get a lot of nodding heads and people start to take it on and listen more. So there needs to be that investment in how you present it rather than just presenting it.
So how could startups become better at developing soft skills?
I think in earlier stages there’s a lot of opportunity for the founding team and the first employees to shape what that culture is. So they can start to build a culture that’s appreciative of those softer skills or cultural abilities. It’s mainly on the founders to encourage that impact, but the smaller the group the bigger contribution each individual team member has.
You need to have those deliberate actions that continue to underpin and underline the things that you stand for.
Why is it important to start at the beginning with culture?
It’s really hard for big organizations to turn their culture around. The culture that you set is set and to start that shift you need to do it in multiples. Typically it takes around 10x the effort to make that turnaround. That’s the amount of effort that it will take to gain a new, true DNA.
So how do you develop your curriculum and what you’re all about?
Our curriculum has been through many iterations and we do it collaboratively. We work with the people we’re looking to serve, the hiring managers at some of the fastest growing companies. And the conversations starters are as easy as:
- What are the things you want in the people you hire?
- Why didn’t your hire someone?
- What missed the mark?
And from there you can build the conversation on the things that you want to enhance in any professional. So it’s always changing, even though some personality traits has stood the test of time. We’re right there in the dialogue with a ton of people to make sure that the thing we put out always meet that market’s intentions.
Thank you Shaun! How do people get in contact with you or get to know more about the Startup Institute?
No problem, glad I could be of help. I’m available on Twitter and you can look at the Startup Institute’s website to get to know more about us and our programs.
I’m researching culture building in startups for my MA in Digital Media Management at Hyper Island. For more info: http://bit.ly/building-startup-culture
