The importance of building fast-response roles in a startup
In order to work in a smart way, to sell and to build long-term success for a company, entrepreneurs need to create an agile organization able to respond to customers, competitors, market opportunities, and crisis scenarios as shortly as possible. To do that, founders and team members must share the same organizational culture. Evidently, dealing with colleagues is something complex. Each person has its own life philosophy, paradigms, and self-being. However, when entrepreneurs decide to collaborate with each other, it is because they find similar traits, common goals and vision to bring their business idea to reality.
According to the development of the project, team members work as a flat organization through different stages such as customer discovery, validation, and creation. Consequently, this means that founders could make strategic decisions. At this point, things work easily because the risk of those decisions is low. As the development of the startup grows further on, and the internal working model of the founders moves to functional roles, they need to decentralize the decision-making process so each area can react in real-time basis to changes.
No organizational habit is more dangerous than waiting for a big decision.
To ensure that this waiting does not happen, entrepreneurs need to develop mission-driven culture and decentralized management styles that push decisions in a more effective way. How could this be possible? Commitment must be the first internal agreement as a team. Priorities according to schedules, milestones, and specific tasks should be well defined since the beginning. Therefore, everyone knows which aspects are the most important for each one in the team.
Based on the previous thought, it is vital to follow the second principle of structural fast-response departments while building a company (Blank, 2006), which refers to the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act). Through a clear observation, entrepreneurs could integrate information about how they work in a regular way: Who carries messages? How is information given to the rest of the team?, and how do they solve situations?. Orientation focuses on defining if role missions are well understood by everyone else according to the roles they play. It is important to remember that even though some team members could emphasize more on certain factors of the startup, all of them should know both the big picture and key issues that affect the company’s affairs. According to the decision-making stage of the cycle mentioned before, here is where founders should analyze the way they decide, and how do they base their attention through corporate, departmental, or independent missions. Although decision making is the main factor in a startup since it defines the development and the speed to accomplish goals, the action stage is the most relevant and riskiest factor to care. Here, entrepreneurs need to evaluate if they have efficient processes for executing tactical decisions immediately. Additionally, they must evaluate if their procedures involve synchronization of actions and if they have lessons-learned methods for reviewing past decisions.
Responsibility = Accountability = Ownership, and a sense of ownership is the most powerful weapon a team or organization can have. ~Pat Summitt
Mission-centric management is the foundation on which agile companies build fast-response roles or departments. This administration deals better with fundamental problems such as uncertainty and time that a startup face. Although precision and certainty are unattainable in most situations, the startup must build on what is achievable: speed and agility. Working with a mission-centric management, founders find the flexibility to deal with rapidly changing situations. This model for decision-making process provides a company with flexibility, cohesion, and responsiveness but it requires conscious thinking from both managers and employees.
The description of a role mission details the tasks to be done but not the reason or intention for executing them. The intention looks for the result of what the team expects. It is the most important step because although the situation may change, the intention is more enduring and continues to guide the startup’s actions. By making the mission purpose widely known across the members of the team, it gives them as much freedom as possible to choose how the goals ultimately get accomplished. While working on quick response to situations, startups also practice and challenge their leadership skills. There are no explicit guidelines nor detailed directions, instead there is a broad trail to follow. Through this methodology, teams maximize low-level initiatives while achieving a high level of cooperation in order to respond to both expected and unexpected situations.
Entrepreneurs should focus on the success of their startup and its bases: searching, finding, and exploiting opportunities. To do so, founders and members of a startup must accept that taking the initiative and acting on their own doesn’t mean they are free to act. To perform in a responsible way, they should keep the mission in mind and coordinate their actions among the diverse areas and people.
Creating a culture of members’ initiative depends on making alliances, selecting, hiring, and retaining people who work best in this type of environment.
Fast responses would not be achieved if founders hire or tolerate members in the team who wait for orders or believe they must do everything by the book. Collaborators must tell if they feel uncomfortable or if they perceive a colleague that feels as a superstar who will never cooperate with their peers. (Blank, 2006)
As mentioned before, every team of founders needs to act with conviction and confidence. Working with mutual trust generates effects on morale because it increases the identity of the project and carries people to share goals and achievements.
“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week” ~George Patton
In startups, most decisions face uncertainty because almost every situation is unique. There is no perfect solution, thus entrepreneurs shouldn’t agonize trying to find one. Obviously, there are cases where time is not a limited factor, such as long-term planning, product development, and funding research. In those scenarios, entrepreneurs should not decide in an arbitrary way. For the rest of the situations, startups need a “Good Enough” decision-making culture to practice fast-response actions.
Risks are important to be tracked, that is why mission-centric processes can still fail with the right synchronization between roles. Through customer and product development entrepreneurs find out realities from the market while they work on product features. Together both areas trigger business strategies oriented to accomplish goals and they conjunctly look for the success of the company. Synchronization does not mean exhaustive meetings, but it refers to have well-defined communication channels ensuring that all areas understand the same mission; every team member follows the support in interdepartmental missions; and that they approve the executions of the missions.
Information dissemination is a big issue of agile startups and companies. Data, whether right or wrong, can’t be unseen. If problematic behavior appears, entrepreneurs must be able to deal with it quickly, otherwise, conflicts may turn harder and misunderstanding of the situation could complicate other areas of the company.
Leadership culture depends on developing team maturity. This could be achieved by dealing with challenges, problems and situations together since the beginning. When founders work with simple and complex circumstances, they develop experience on how to face different conditions based on their internal skills and vision of the project.
The goal of building fast-response roles in a startup is the creation of an agile company managed by processes that let it be scalable and competitive through time. The structure that a team establishes from the beginning of their business idea till the time the startup becomes a company, defines the model strategies that it may take for the future.
Entrepreneurs are integrated by brave people, including those who face challenges in an orderly manner and with mission-oriented decisions to impact lives through their projects. Obstacles for a company are going to appear on different situations, but the determination of its leaders is what will make the difference in the business survival and development.
Management culture can be an ally or an enemy depending on the principles, commitment, and morale of the team members. Defining internal roles oriented to mission-driven goals would provide trust, communication, and synchronization among the members, ultimately creating better and faster decision making.
