How TravelTriangle is building future leaders / mini-CEOs
In startups, you don’t have to just get people on speed but you also have to prepare them for future scale and new challenges. As the startup grows exponentially and with so many dynamics getting changed in short time, old knowledge/skills keep becoming stale and there is need of people to keep updating themselves and be able to contribute higher as per the need of the hour. That is why as the startup grows exponentially, you have seen people too grows exponentially, however, the actual scenario is that since people have grown exponentially, the startups have grown exponentially. :)
Here, at TravelTriangle, we make sure that we at least make it more convenient and less difficult for our team members to adapt to future needs and scale & keep growing so that TravelTriangle can grow along with. Here are few ways that we do so:
Right mentorship, direction, and challenging environment:
We tend to hire explorers, not just managers. They are expected to find out new things and ways to do those things instead just keep doing what is being told. They are being thrown with problems to find out a solution themselves. Sometimes problem too has to be identified first.
Expertise and learning gained in last 1–2 year are way more than they could have had learned in his or her 5–6 years of earlier experience. Many of our members had really grown steep rising to Associate director or AVPs position within a span of 2 years. Similarly, few of our developers have also grown to leads or engineering managers in the same time and I’m sure they’ll still keep on rising further.
Few of our people, from HR, Engineering, Marketing, Sales etc., have gone out & started their own startups and are running it successfully. We are really proud of them as well.
Mini Startups inside startup
We have built cross-functional PODs in the company who are complete owner and decision maker of their own projects. Each POD possesses every kind of skills needed to decide or execute things up for that project.
PODs work as mini-startups within core team improvising or adjusting their plan to achieve desired output. Few circles are drawn like expected impact, cost, rough timelines. Rest is onto them to get it done.
Everyone in the company (bottom to top) is connected with the real-time impact of their work over company numbers, product usage as well as customer experience. Direct visibility on the impact they are making or breaking, helps them to close the feedback loop for themselves. :)
POD keeps running a lot of experiments starting with zero budget, a lot of uncertainty and quick iteration. I’d also written an article on how have we enabled them to do so quickly and independently.
New Ideas, plan & ETAs are also flown bottoms up and reviewed from top down to add in the final prioritized list on company level.
Right Culture
We, as founders, are making sure that we set up as well as keep up the right culture and have teams under do the same too for their teams and so on, so forth. Also, we do understand that you have to walk the talk too, so that same culture is reflected in your every actions else they will just end up as some writing on walls, meeting rooms, desks with people soon started treating them as BS.
Proof of fact is that you would get to hear a lot of common phrases in many of our discussions here and people acting or making decisions based on these — fail-fast, effort vs impact, what-how-why, pros & cons, hypothesis vs solution, diamond-gold-silver, “say as it is”, improvisations, RCA, “customer first”.
Each one of these has major significance in our day-2-day things here at TravelTriangle. I’ll keep it for another day to go through these and how they are playing a crucial role in our day-2-day things, however, if you want to experience it first hand, you can join us @ TravelTriangle.
CEO Learning Sessions: Getting teams involved beyond their KRAs
We hold a combined monthly (sometimes bi-weekly) CEO learning sessions to all the teams related to any department or field catering to generals leadership skills ranging from process management, project management, effective planning, executive management, P&L management, effective delegation and much more. It helps us to foster an entrepreneurial mindset within every team and person and thrive culture to involve people beyond their expected KRAs or responsibilities.
Founders and core team makes sure that their experience and learnings are being percolated to all members in the company so as to groom team in all sense. One of the main learnings that we keep teaching them on how to keep failing fast so as to eventually succeed. Instead of hitting the success in one stretch, since it is seldom and hyped.
As a result, we have made our members better planner, decision-maker, more confident and better risk-taker yielding high output in minimal effort for real-life/practical scenarios.
Conclusion
It’s important for startups to keep investing in their team members and providing right direction as well as mentorship. Further, it is also crucial to make sure that everyone follows the same, top to down, with the same seriousness as top management does.
Please do note that few of your members will surprise you amazingly while few might need more work or time but will keep showing signal to re-enforce your guts that they will succeed and they do. Trust me, those will be the most loyal & aligned members, you would have had. For rest, you need to make sure that you take right calls at right times if you don’t want to f*ck culture and momentum in your company.
Ending the article with one of my favorite quote from Dharmesh Shah, Founder & CTO, HubSpot — “It’s not the ping-pong tables and beer that build culture — it’s the behaviors.”
