If your team members aren’t learning, your SaaS startup isn’t growing
There’s a zen saying that goes like so:
“When you have met your opposite, celebrate — for you are liberated.”
If that’s true, then I’d best describe my first few months at Airstory as, um, liberating.
See, I used to consider myself technically adept.
Used to.
That was before I joined a SaaS startup as the go-to person for user success — if you experience a tech challenge using Airstory, you talk to me. I help you solve the problem. 🎉
Easy enough, right? When I first started, I thought, sure, I know Airstory. I could definitely tell a person why Airstory doesn’t have markdown (after I Google why someone would want markdown 😳) (‘what IS markdown?’) (oh wait you can export from Airstory to markdown).
Believe it or not, in my previous role, I was the go-to tech person. Y’know the person in the office that other people ask for when they can’t get their computer to do what they want it to do? That was me. I knew computer-y things.
So coming into this role I knew I was gonna deal with tech and I wasn’t scared. Obviously working for SaaS (had to look that one up, whiiich shoulda been my first sign…), I knew there’d be a learning curve. But I had NO idea how much I didn’t know about the basics of tech. It wasn’t until I began to sit in on meetings with the head of product and our software engineers (e.g. the real go-to techy people) that it finally hit me: I’d gone from most-technical to least-technical person in the room.
And here’s what that taught me:
In a startup, just as in any organization, you need supportive environments to create great employees
What happens when you’re in learning mode… and there’s a limited number of roles… and a limited number of people?
Everybody becomes your mentor.
In 2016, the team at Google released their findings from a 2-year study of the characteristics of the most productive teams. They found that the interpersonal dynamics of successful teams — those that created psychologically safe environments for asking questions and taking positive risks — outweighed team composition.
That is, to be a successful, productive team, all members need to:
- Willingly contribute to the team by sharing their expert knowledge with their coworkers
- Willingly offer feedback of their team and openly receive feedback from them
- Feel their contributions are meaningful and that they, in effect, are capable of creating change
That’s how teams can self-inject energy and problem-solving into their work. That’s how the best startups do it.
Back in 1990 Peter Senge called teams like these “Learning Organizations.”
A Learning Organization, Sange held, is a cohesive group of individuals rallied around a central goal of ongoing learning and development within their business. All team members of a Learning Organization, including the CEO, contribute and are receptive to ongoing personal development, training and feedback to this end: each member of the team learns something about her/himself and thus grows.
The purpose of a learning organization is to keep the organization energized, competitive and relevant.
“When you’re a team of five doing the work of 10 people, you need to be able to collaborate, and collaborate well.” 1
That said, a work culture focused on learning and personal development can lead to negative outcomes as well. For those not receptive to collaboration and ongoing informal mentorship, a startup can be exhausting and stressful.
Every team member needs to mentor and be mentored
Perhaps the hardest thing for me as a member of a tech startup team is not my lack of coding ability but rather this: I struggle to appreciate that my soft skills are teachable skills.
At this early stage, we’re so deep in product iteration that it can feel like the only skills worth discussing and sharing are tied to programming. The conversations worth having are these and these.
But then our CEO reminds me: we’re building a solution for people who write. Is there a softer skill on the planet than writing?
And so with that in mind, I’ve decided to better appreciate the lateral mentorship at work at Airstory. While our head developer coaches me through the technical side of our product, I’m coaching our team through:
- building rapport with Airstory users to establish a good relationship and the opportunity to capture insight into users’ needs, expectations, challenges and wins
- conflict management which can enable our support staff to proactively identify conflict triggers and appease these tensions prior to them developing further
- adult learning principles that can be used to hone our on-boarding efforts to help users better retain and implement what they’ve learned in Airstory’s on-boarding experience
- behavioral change insights to help team members better understand the stages of change that new users progress through and to elucidate the factors that compel our users to adopt Airstory workflows
Are you building a Learning Organization as you build your startup?
Not only does collaborative learning feed the need for skill development in those of us with less *cough* experience in tech — but it also helps other team members grow in knowledge and skill. It endears team members to the organization.
“The culture of an organization is the foundation of a great organization”2
Because any one employee could be called upon to be an informal mentor of a new hire, it’s in the startup’s best interest to filter new hires for cultural fit. This can help ensure they jibe with internal core values of ongoing team member learning and development. It creates an environment that’s more likely to succeed as a Learning Organization.
Startup hires need to be open to working and contributing to supportive and mutually-beneficial learning environments. This helps build an ecosystem where new and senior team members can continuously grow and develop.
For some, however, this learning organization mentality — especially where the resources can be limited and the knowledge gaps can be wide — can precipitate burnout. For some, the startup is not the best work-culture fit for their personality.
Although Airstory is small and open to sharing knowledge fluidly, as we grow we’re going to have to protect this learning culture, decidedly. Outside of skill and experience, new hires need to fit into this continuous learning culture. This culture of psychological safety.
How does your startup stack up?
