A Tea Bag in Hot Water

How to Be a Change Agent in a Startup

Over the last 4 years I’ve worked with a range of startups in healthcare and design, many for quick bursts of time as a designer brought in to inject creative thinking into the process or culture. And I realised, I’m not alone. Short-term employment is an increasing trend in a world where companies of all sizes need to get stuff done fast and well, and where transient talents are taking time to figure out cultural fit before they commit longer term.

So, what’s it like trying to deliver immediate value?

Being a short term employee, you have a lot of pressure to reach your impact goals given your timeframe and the highly volatile nature of startups. Not forgetting the culture barrier if you’re working abroad or operating in a new discipline or industry. All of these can pose challenges that need overcoming. Given, say, a 6-month time frame, how do you get past the first 2–3 months of learning and spend the next 3 months making a significant contribution that can live on past your tenure?

Debbie’s 10 tips for creating impact quickly

1. People come before tasks, so learn about them first

Team dynamics are the sum of all the individuals in that team, so deeply and actively observing how different people work will help you understand how to get what you need in order to get things done — or even influence how they are done. Not only that, but it will also help people get what they need from you in order to make things happen within the organisation.

Ultimately, people are the key to anything getting done, so make it a primary goal to understand them first, above the task-based workflows of the organisation. If that means taking Tina the office manager out for coffee in your first week and talking about her kids’ playdate, do it. Find little and often ways to tune in to what makes them tick.

2. Create opportunities for meaningful conversations to drive change

Bringing people together is often taken for granted as a valuable change-making skill. Doing this meaningfully requires a combination of facilitating the right conversations and having the right people offer their knowledge towards a particular outcome. Set a clear intention of what type of outcome you want.

For example, say you are trying to solve the problem of bad revenue. Invite people beyond the core sales or business development team such as the culture, HR or design team to give you more holistic perspective on where the problems might be. To get people in the right mindset, frame the challenge in a way that will give you better chances at designing an effective solution, for instance, ‘How might we as a holistic business contribute to servicing our customers better, in order to increase revenue?’

3. Trust your own opinion and feelings

Being in an unfamiliar environment brings up a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity which can knock you off your personal rhythm. The dynamic startup environment adds to this uncertainty and ambiguity, so it’s important to remind yourself when you are problem-solving that your intuition and feelings that arise from being in this environment are valid and worth addressing.

Identify the different components contributing to these feelings and what can be modified to help you stay productive. Set boundaries around potentially negative effects. You may be surprised that others might feel the same — they have just learned to either accept or cope with the current state after awhile! Bringing these things up at the right moments can help everyone be more conscious about how it affects them.

4. Don’t be afraid to change things that don’t make sense

It’s easy for early founders and employees to get into an unconscious routine, and if they hired you for the right reasons, they should be taking advantage of your fresh perspective. Don’t be afraid to reflect back what you’re seeing happen in the organisation, but be wary that they might not be ready for it or could see it as criticism, rather than caring. To mitigate this and stay on the constructive side, you could propose your own mini-projects.

Identify people who could add value to your initiative with their skills and who have the passion. This will help you gain necessary insight that you’re missing, being new, as well as build a team that can own the change once you are gone. Those people will probably be stoked that someone has identified them as being valuable and asked them to work on something meaningful. Being an intrapreneur can start as small as organising an event for people to build community relationships or creating a micro-process that improves expense reports so people can spend their energy elsewhere.

5. Invite others to the learning party — allow yourself to be vulnerable

Startup life will smother you with learnings and it can be hard not to get overwhelmed. Whether you are the CEO or the intern, you have just as much to learn from everyone around you. Therefore, it’s important to set your own learning goals for an experience and share them with your team. The best way to include others in that process is to admit your vulnerabilities, whether your emotional states or gaps in your skills and knowledge. Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know something or you don’t feel well-equipped to those around you.

Just like the parties you throw to celebrate successes after learning, invite people who are important to your development to the journey itself. Letting others help you also gives them permission to let you in, and in the long run the whole team or company grows together. Schedule pre-, mid- and post-project reviews on your progress to make sure you get what you want out of the experience and help the company extract value from you. When all is well and learned, your team will also be able to share the success with you more meaningfully.

6. Give others permission to give you structured, candid feedback

A mirror is there to tell you things as they are, and while people will never be totally objective, giving the people that are brave enough to be your mirrors the permission to tell you the hard stuff will help you understand how you operate in these highly stressful and uncertain environments. Design your own feedback structure that guides people on the kind of feedback you want in your growth. They’ll thank you for as it makes it easier for them to think of what to play back to you. What are the most important questions you want answered, that make you unproductive or unpleasant to be around? What are simple factors that affect your ability to influence?

Remember that people shouldn’t be limited to answering just those questions: give them explicit permission to point out ‘off your radar’ or ‘left field’ feedback too. It’s likely that valuable feedback might not fit within your structure (it could be the hard stuff that difficult to receive!) so people might not express it. Yet often times, these nuggets help you grow the most.

7. Embrace your inner entrepreneurial chameleon

Being part of a startup team means you often have to transform yourself and learn how to apply your skill sets and knowledge to environments or challenges you haven’t ever had to. Whether the new environment is a new team or a new project, your learning curve is going to look like a ski slope. Embrace it. One day you might be negotiating the next business partnership, the next day you might be doing quality assurance on the product, and that same evening painting a wall in the office red to make it feel more like the company ‘lives here’.

Startup life involves wearing a lot of different hats and some of them may feel like they just don’t fit your brain at all — some too small and demeaning, some too big that hinder your vision on the path to follow. The key is finding the right balance of mental stimulation from your roles. That could mean having a mixture of roles that you are really comfortable with, some that might even be a little mindless and others that you’re on your tiptoes trying to reach for success in.

8. Define your “Minimum Viable Change” ASAP

In the startup world, everyone is fairly familiar with the concept of a building a “Minimum Viable Product” to deliver to the market, but as a startup change agent, one of the first things you need to define to yourself (and ideally your startup team if they are open to it) is what your ‘Minimum Viable Change’ is. This is basically the minimum acceptable change in the organisation that you would like to see happen before your time is up. It can be anything from financial performance to product iterations to less tangible things like culture outcomes.

Bear in mind you probably won’t be able to define it right away as it takes time to do a diagnosis on the organisational state and figure out where the problems are that you can realistically solve. Don’t rush into it, but then don’t leave it too long either otherwise you won’t have enough time to help the changes develop sustainably. You might define your ‘MVC’ in terms of quantifiable measurements such as percentage increases, or qualitative measurements like feelings, it’s up to you to choose what’s most appropriate.

9. Fix your own oxygen mask first

There’s a reason why airline safety videos advise you to fix your own oxygen mask before those of any children you may be travelling with. If you can’t stay alive and stand on your own two feet, then how can others lean on you for support? This couldn’t be more true when it comes to the context of startups. Because no one really knows what they are doing when building a company for the first time, it’s easy to feel unsure, under-appreciated and exhausted as a result of the ambiguity and intensity of the process. This can take a toll on your confidence, productivity and health.

Startup founders and teams are especially good at sacrificing their own mental and physical health under the pressure of getting a product to market before money runs out or a competitor claims market share, but remember to take a step back and be realistic about what you need mentally, emotionally and physically to be able to sustainably contribute to or lead the company. Sometimes being unproductive can be the most productive thing you can do.

10. Accept your limits — some things are out of your control

As a friend reminded me, “sometimes you will plant seeds, sometimes you can harvest them, and sometimes they die because the ground is not right.” It can be hard to accept that sometimes you can’t always get to see the fruit, but it is a humbling experience you must sometimes go through.

Accepting that you couldn’t make the impact you wanted doesn’t have to be a sign of weakness, it can also be an indication of how resistant to change a place is, or where to level up your change-making abilities. Though you can’t win every fight, bear in mind that while you couldn’t reap some things in your last project, you can take the learnings and reap the fruits in your next one. The challenges will make you a better change agent as long as you stay persistent, reflective and resilient.

So there you have it! My hope is that whether you’re an employee, startup founder or hiring manager, in whatever industry you’re in, the lessons I’ve learned in the context of healthcare and design projects will have some crossover for you. To stay in touch with my journey, find me at www.deborahritapaterson.com.

Debbie Rita Paterson is designing her own experiential masters program or pre-entrepreneurial year in healthcare innovation through 6-month-long experiences in different companies, cities and design disciplines, called My Life Major. She is currently in Berlin, working at healthcare startup Mimi.io. Before that, she spent 6 months in Singapore with design firm IDEO.

The Coop is an open platform to spread field-tested learnings amongst the growing community of practice within and beyond Singapore. We’ll feature people and ideas in our ecosystem who are using diverse methods and tools to solve policy, service and operational challenges.

We were excited to feature Debbie as she lives and breathes the changing norms of work and education. Follow us for more! — Jason & Shan, The Coop Editors