Who’s missing from your team?
I vividly remember being at university and there being a running joke about the BA students, mainly about their employability and the general ‘usefulness’ of their degrees compared to the practicality and employment opportunities available to commerce students and engineering students.
I was reminded of this when working in a selection training program for one of the country’s leading fellowship programs, which aims to identify and support thousands of high impact entrepreneurs from high school, through to university and into their own startups. The organisation assists potential fellows on the basis that they pursue a commerce degree or a humanities degree majoring in Philosophy, Politics or Economics.
This type of thinking about who ‘should’ be an entrepreneur or part of an entrepreneurial team replicates itself in many startup teams in the country as well, having been part of an accelerator for my own startup, I noticed that many of us co-founded our startups with people who can ‘business’ i.e former lawyers, accountants, bankers or people with technical skills relevant to the industry/field our startups were in.
Having been involved in Organisational Design at Inquisition, which, as I was told by one of its co-founders, Vincent Hofmann, is a startup again (and also operates as an adhocracy) and working with a team consisting of a Scientist, a Sociologist, a Fine Artist, a Human-Centred Strategy Consultant (having studied Philosophy, majoring in Inclusive Innovation) and a guy called Steve (just kidding, he’s actually a Computer Engineering student, I had to get him back) in possibly the most creatively stimulating, agile and innovative spaces I’ve ever been in, I became even more convinced that the currently normalised criteria for co-founders and even hiring might need some adjustment.
I’m of the belief that local startup teams aiming to create the next innovative product or service need to get with the program and look beyond the learned bias towards co-founding with technically skilled people and people who can ‘business’ and building more diverse teams. I’ve found that a lot of the skills we think we need in our founding teams can be outsourced or just aren’t as important as we think at the early stage. Usually the most important skills and competencies are the ones we tend to overlook because of this bias.
This often works to our detriment as we tend to build teams with exposure to common mental models and approaches to life and work resulting in the same/similar solutions to problems. Are we still missing the point? I’d say so, I mean success for startups really hinges on two things; ideas (in the broad sense) and people, not necessarily code and spreadsheets, so why do we tend to overlook people with a passion for/competence in researching culture, people and behaviour? Such as you’d find in an anthropologist or sociologist for example? Or people who are artistically inclined? Any comment on the rate at which industries and societies are changing has become so commonplace that it’s become cliche, so why do we still follow industrial age templates to build our own teams or hire people and then expect these teams to innovate and be responsive to change?
success for startups really hinges on two things; ideas (in the broad sense) and people, not necessarily code and spreadsheets
Steve Jobs has a famous quote about creativity, and by extension innovation, being about ‘connecting dots’ and in order to connect the dots, you first have to collect the dots. ‘Collecting the dots’ in this instance refers to building a team of capable, adaptable people, with a common mission and shared values but different mental models, competencies and life experiences that can be synthesized and drawn from to arrive at new solutions through interaction and effective teamwork.
So in conclusion, before putting together a team or hiring someone, look at the bigger picture and your overarching mission, then expand your horizons and try to look beyond the ‘hard skill’ bias to see who might be missing.
