Executive Coach Bill Tobin: How to Understand Your Startup Team Better
Practical Advice for Startup Founders to Reduce Stress and Improve Productivity
By Collin West and Fernanda Orona
Scaling a startup is difficult. Most founders find the task of building and motivating the right team equal parts rewarding and daunting. This is particularly true for younger founders, who are starting their first companies or who have limited experience in the corporate world.
“Look at the word responsibility – response-ability – the ability to choose your response.” –Stephen R. Covey
Add the pressure of the COVID-19 lockdown and remote work into the mix, and the equation gets even more difficult. In this paper, Ensemble Ventures partnered with Bill Tobin, Managing Partner of LearningEdge Leadership. The following tips have been gathered to help founders understand how to improve their communication, collaboration, and conflict resolution skills.
Behavioral Fitness Arc
The startup and venture capital world is defined by the power law. As a startup operator or investor, you will have thousands of interactions per year but 2 or 3 have the potential to change your life. The challenge? You don’t know when those meaningful interactions will happen.
If you knew that tomorrow morning you were going to meet Bill Gates and discuss starting a business with him, you would clear your schedule today, do your homework, and make sure you got plenty of sleep.
But what if you’re a founder working 60 hours a week and have back-to-back meetings? How do you know when you will meet that one customer that completely changes the trajectory of your startup? That’s why you can’t risk having an off day.
The Behavioral Fitness Arc outlines three major points:
Start by bringing your "Best Self" to every situation.
After you have mastered your best version, create more "Effective Relationships" within your team.
Once you have functional and trusted relationships, you can then move to create "Collaborative Teaming” within your company, family, and community.
Let’s dig into more details about your Best Self. You wouldn’t set out for a cross-country roadtrip with an empty tank of gas. In the same way, our physical bodies are the foundation on which we build our emotional, intellectual, and spiritual layers.
How many times have you started an interaction at a disadvantage, with your body not fully rested or on an empty stomach? How many times have you brought disappointment or anger from a previous meeting into your current situation?
Likewise, how much care do you put into your emotional (quality of relationship), intellectual (focus and accomplishment), and spiritual (our story of why we are here) being? As we work from home and find it difficult to connect with colleagues, we should spend more time than usual thinking about these topics.
Bringing your Best Self implies taking care of all of the facets of your life, so you’re not feeling like you are dragging work into your personal life or finding it impossible to disconnect because your work seems endless.
Remember, your personal brand is not your social following. Your personal brand is how you show up to every meeting.
Since we want to bring our best self to every situation, we need to focus on emotional fitness first. We can then optimize our most important relationships by managing our own threat responses and to understand how to steer clear of the threat responses of others.
The SCARF Threat Response Model
SCARF is a response model developed by Dr. David Rock in 2008. The acronym SCARF stands for the five key areas that influence human behavior in social settings:
Status is about relative importance to others, or a perception of where we are in relation to the people around us.
Certainty is about eliminating ambiguity.
Autonomy is the perception of having control over our environment; a feeling of having choices.
Relatedness involves deciding whether we are ‘in’ or ‘out’ of a particular social group; we prefer belonging to a tribe.
Fairness is the expectation to be treated consistently with peers.
Each of these areas will have a threat and a reward response. For instance, people who score high on Autonomy do not want to be micromanaged (threat) and look for opportunities to take on more responsibility and have less structure (reward). However, someone who values Certainty would have a very different response to a micromanager.
“I suggest that management teams take the SCARF Assessment to see how different people score. For example, one individual might score highest on Status and another might score the highest on Fairness. Understanding what pushes them to have such a strong stress response can help build better teams with a more collaborative edge,” shared Bill Tobin.
Individually, taking the SCARF assessment can be helpful. But the real power is having your entire management team take the test together and highlight the differences. As a founder, you should not apply a one-size-fits-all approach to your core team members.
You can learn more by watching this video by Dr. David Rock or taking the SCARF Assessment here.
Conclusion
There is no shortage of things for startup executives and board members to worry about. But one of the best investments is understanding and developing your team.
The more you understand your team, the better they will perform. Your work will also be less mentally and physically taxing and more enjoyable. This is not a nice to have or something that can be pushed down the road.
According to a study among startup investors conducted by Noah Wasserman, respondents shared that 65% of business failures were directly attributable to problems within the management team. That’s why we suggest every startup to think about the Best Self Framework and SCARF Model.
Improving your behavioral fitness leads to a better dynamic in our most important relationships at work and at home. At the same time, keep in mind to always bring your Best Self to every meeting and when making every decision. The SCARF Model, by contrast, can highlight where things can go wrong and how to better understand interpersonal conflicts.
Issues like a healthy relationship between co-founders and executives is as important to a startup’s success as product-market fit.