Numbers vs stories in a start-up: An accidental split test about team cultures
Recently I was chatting with one of the senior managers in the Moko (a furniture start-up based in Kenya) team and she mentioned how she was having a hard time motivating her team to care about their job. They would discuss things which were not working on the team, everyone would commit in meetings to change things only to come back to the same problems a few days later: lagging behind targets and shying away taking ownership of anything that wasn’t written in their job description.
I stepped back to think about the teams that I was managing and tried to tease out what makes people care about their work and walk the extra mile. I was surprised to realize that I had adopted two different management styles for the two teams I was managing: they had a similar background, similar age groups and had been hired with the same recruitment process. Some members had also worked in one team before moving to the other. No evident differences, it was an accidental split test: it was great to spot patterns.
Team A is very clear about its goals and on ownership of delivery towards those goals. We would have meetings to update the goals and everyone would know if we were ahead or behind targets. The goals were quantitative, profit-oriented and easy to track. During our monthly check-ins, I would identify the products that were falling behind the profit targets and discuss what challenges we were facing. The discussion would be focused on fixing the problem based on what we learned in the past. The morale and the vibe in the team would be correlated with the sales: when sales were up the team would be buzzing with energy, when sales would be down we would feel the slump and try to plow through the moment.
Team B is a team with only one goal which was not owned by anyone in particular. We would start our meetings with chitchats and would have a learning session led by each team member: one day, for example, we would talk about what roles luck and timing play in a business — the discussion would end with few ideas but practical action points. We had one simple goal but only a small part of the meeting was spent talking about it. I preferred to talk about what lights up the spark in customers’ eyes, to share crazy ideas off the agenda we had set at the beginning of the meeting and discuss about them. Towards the end of the meetings we would share things we’ve learned from other companies and chat if they could apply to our model: it didn’t matter if the answer was no, the focus was on the discussion
Now guess: which team cared the most about their work? And which team was better at hitting their profit targets? If you guessed that team B was the team that cared the most you were right: they would go out of the way to make customers’ happy and get themselves to work extra hours because putting a smile on customers’ faces mattered to them. Stories and customers’ response and sentiments were more motivating than sales numbers.
Team B — and this is what was surprising to me — is also the team that hit most of its profit targets. They would only occasionally mention the sales target but they would consistently outperform it. You don’t talk about the elephant in the room and somehow the elephant is taken care of. It turns out — and that was the lesson for me — that putting the heart and the human side of your business — what customers feel and say and what your team members feel and say — might be the not-so-secret ingredients to achieve your sales targets. That big crazy ideas and chitchats would not be in the way of and distracting from sales targets but could lead directly to them.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +415,678 people.
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