Innovation Footprints

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Organizational Behavior

How Studying Bankruptcy And Working On Two Turnaround Assignments Prepared Me To Become An Early Stage Venture Capitalist

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The Chinese Character for Crisis; Danger + Opportunity (From The Ten Strategies For Leading At The Edge)
The Chinese Character for Crisis; Danger + Opportunity (From The Ten Strategies For Leading At The Edge)

 

When I started business school at NYU Stern in the fall of 2005 my plan centered on taking every class in Bankruptcy & Reorganization, and Distressed Investing that I could. I took 3 elective classes in that area; Bankruptcy & Reorganization with Prof. Ed Altman, Case Studies in Bankruptcy & Reorganization with Prof. Max Holmes, and Investment Strategies: Distressed Investing with Prof. Allan Brown.

By my logic, if I learned how to assess and invest in dying companies, and then nurse them back to health, analysing, valuing and investing in healthy companies would seem easy by comparison. I was so sure of this that I also tried to turn my Equity Valuation elective into a pseudo Bankruptcy & Reorganization course too, by opting to value a bankrupt company for my final group-project. I do not recommend trying that.

I was still in business school when the economy began to falter. I moved from UBS to Lehman Brothers in late March 2007. A few days later New Century Financial Corp. filed for Bankruptcy. I was let go from Lehman Brothers a year later, on March 12, 2008. Bear Stearns collapsed and was acquired by JP Morgan Chase on March 16, 2008. I graduated from Stern in May, 2008. On September 7, 2008 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the federal government. Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008. On September 16, 2008 the Fed bailed out AIG.

The rest of 2008 was a bloodbath.

It was in that environment that I joined KEC Holdings, KEC Ventures parent company, in December 2008. I was employee #2. I had been hired into a new role that had not existed before at the company. My responsibilities encompassed any direct and indirect investments the company had made, or might make in the future.

Most notably, the company had already made 2 private equity investments; one in a private jet charter company and another in a fine-dining restaurant group – they were struggling to stay afloat given the economic environment. My first order of duty was to “make sure they don’t die” and “help them come out of this mess stronger than they were going into it.” There would be no financial engineering gimmickry. No tried and true business school textbook “indiscriminate” cost-cutting shortcuts. I had to roll up my sleeves and work with each company as intimately as necessary to achieve the objectives.

This post is about how we navigated that period. It is also about what that period between December 2008 and August 2013 has taught me about the challenges startups face, and my role as a venture capitalist.

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. - Matsuo Basho
Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
– Matsuo Basho

Further Background

Both companies were generating top-line revenues in the range of $20,000,000 – $30,000,000 per year. Both had fallen short of budgetary expectations in 2008, but the aviation company had a more prolonged string of losses than the fine-dining restaurant, partly because the restaurant was a more recent investment at that point. I functioned as an “external management consultant”; I was not a full-time employee of either company, but I worked with employees across the hierarchy of both companies. The restaurant company employed between 400 and 500 people while the aviation company had between 30 and 40 employees after several previous rounds of downsizing.

Both companies had watched as some of their competitors ran into strong headwinds, and subsequently shut down operations because the economic environment was so bleak.

Lesson #1: Understand The Business

Once a company is in financial distress investors have to decide if it is worth saving, and they also have to answer the accompanying question; can it be saved given current known constraints? The only way to do this is to develop a deep understanding of the business, and the context within which it is operating.

Between 2008 and 2012, confidence in the economy was very low. People simply were not splurging on expensive meals or luxury jets. An economist would say that private jet charter and fine-dining both have a high elasticity of demand.

I had no prior experience working at, let alone helping to run a restaurant or a private jet charter company. So I decided to spend the first six months in learning mode. I studied everything I could about both markets while I helped the executives and managers at both companies deal with day-to-day nuts-and-bolts issues.

This was important if I was going to build personal credibility, and if I wanted to win buy-in for my ideas from the executives and managers later on. I had to be able to influence them into doing things they probably did not believe in at the outset, and I had to do this with little real influence.

How this applies to early-stage startups: Today, I look for founders who embrace their expertise, and demonstrate a knowledge of their business that surpasses mine. However, the founder also has to demonstrate an ability to assist me learn enough about their industry to make a decision, and act as a useful sounding board for decisions that have to be made in the future.

Lesson #2: Understand The People

During those six months, I also tried to understand the protagonists in each situation. I relied on a technique I had learned in my Literature in English classes during secondary school in Ghana; character analyses.

A character analyses involves performing an in-depth study of the key characters in a drama, and trying to figure out each character’s story; What motivates that person? Why is that person who they are? What is the person afraid of? What drives that person? How does that person communicate? How does that person respond to pressure and stress. What does that person gain the most satisfaction from? What’s the state of that person’s family life? How does that person perceive me? How do I perceive that person? Does that person buy into the need for a turnaround? Is that person willing to commit to the turnaround? What biases does the person exhibit that I can identify? How does that affect things?

I had to be honest, and to contend with the pleasant and the unpleasant, especially around the perceptions other people had of me at the outset.

I took copious notes, and added to them until I felt I had a decent understanding of each of the people with decision-making authority that I would be dealing with most often; executives, managers, and front-line employees.

Perhaps an important, but often overlooked insight is that an investor should strive to understand the people within the context of the business. For example, is this person a leader or a manager? The distinction matters because it can spell the difference between beating about the bush with no results to show, or getting to the heart of the matter and fixing the problems that need to be solved at a tactical and granular level. Fred Wilson writes about this problem in: Leaders and Executives.

How this applies to early-stage startups: We make seed stage and series A investments. That early in a startup’s life, the people make all the difference. The market is important, so is the product. However, at this stage the future is still so nebulous and difficult to envision that the team that has decided to embark on that journey matters more than anything else. So, I have learned to focus on questions like; How did this team come together? Do the founders take responsibility for outcomes, or do they have a habit of passing blame? Do they have the intestinal fortitude to withstand the difficulties they are bound to face as individuals, and as a team on this difficult path they have chosen or will they wilt under pressure? What evidence do I have to support my answer to this question. What is their approach to learning, as individuals and as a team? Have they faced crises together? How did they fare when the going got tough? I will not ask most of these questions directly, but I will be processing every interaction, every bit of information I get, to determine answers to questions along this line of reasoning.

Lesson #3: Create A Sense of Urgency, But Provide Hope

Unlike a startup, a company in financial distress already has a product that it has sold successfully in the past, it also has a sense of who its customers are and where to find them. It is easy for the people within the company to succumb to status quo bias. This is identifiable by statements such as;

  1. “Everything will be fine, we just need to close this one sale.”
  2. “I feel confident it will happen, we have this sale in the bag.”
  3. “They are not our competitor, they do not do what we do!”

In the face of incontrovertible evidence that “they are up shit’s creek without a paddle” people will still choose to do what feels comfortable.

It was my responsibility to shake them out of that rut. As John P. Kotter says in Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail; 75% or more of a company’s management has to buy into the need for change, otherwise the chance that the change effort will fail is unacceptably high.

How did I do this? In both cases I did not shy away from asking questions that I expected to generate conflict. Indeed, on several occasions I had to have unpleasant and difficult conversations with the top managers and executives in both companies. I did this even if it appeared that I was “meddling” in areas where I had no business poking around. Of course, the idea that there was a part of either company’s operations that I “had no business” exploring was a fallacy only someone keen on maintaining the status quo would believe.

The message, delivered by the investors and the board, and reiterated by me during my frequent field trips, was simple; “The status quo is unacceptable, and failure for lack of effort is out of the question.” We had one chance to get it right, and we had to make the most of that chance even if it meant discomfort some of the time. We could get there with or without conflict. It was entirely up to us to make that choice.

How this applies to early-stage startups: The time for the whole team to start thinking about the Series A Round of Financing is the night before the Seed Round closes. Some one on the team should always be thinking about what it will take to raise the next round.

The time to start thinking about revenues is yesterday, even if you do not implement those plans immediately. Always have a plan. Always test your plan.

Lesson #4: Investors Have Ideas, But Management Runs The Business

Investors will always have ideas about how a business should be run. Sometimes investors know more about a certain topic than management. It is okay for investors to make suggestions, and to offer ideas to management. However, responsibility for choosing which ideas to accept and which to reject has to rest on the shoulders of management, and management has to accept accountability for the outcomes.

There are a number of ways this aspect of the relationship between investors and management might unfold;

  1. Investors can dictate to management what investors think management should do, or
  2. Investors can teach management how and why things should be done a certain way.

I chose the latter. That approach takes more time, but it is also more likely to lead to permanent change in behavior than the former. Also, once the lessons had taken root that approach allowed me to gradually pull back my involvement without jeopardizing the progress that management was making in improving results. It is an approach that builds self-sufficiency.

As part of the process, we cultivated the practice of communicating:

  1. Why a certain goal or strategic initiative was important for the company’s near term goals and long term vision.
  2. What had to get done in order for that goal or strategic initiative to be successfully executed.
  3. Who specifically was primarily responsible for seeing that it got done, and which executive they could go to as often as necessary in order to navigate what ever obstacles they might encounter.
  4. How it would get done, not in excruciating detail, but in broad terms. For example; Which teams needed to collaborate with one another in order to make it happen?
  5. When the team expected to be able to report back periodically on their progress, and importantly, when the project needed to be complete.

To do this successfully, I had to focus on asking questions and encouraging deeper levels of inquiry than was the custom beforehand. Asking probing questions helped us cut out the “bullshit” of conventional wisdom that is seductively easy to accept.

Each time I heard; “You do not understand, that is not how it is done in our industry.” I would ask; “Why?” That would lead to an examination of the assumptions behind the choices that had been made in the past. Often there was no good reason to refuse to try something different even if it seemed out of step with accepted industry convention.

How this applies to early-stage startups: I am looking for founders at the seed or series A stage whose judgement I can trust enough to feel they do not need me to opine on every decision they ever have to make. That does not mean I am passive. It means I need to trust their decision-making skill and maturity enough to feel confident they will consistently make the right choices for all the startup’s constituents without the need to run everything by investors.

From the investors’ perspective, a policy of “show, don’t tell” goes a long way. To paraphrase the oft quoted saying; “Give a founder a fish and . . . . ” If I feel there’s something a founder ought to learn, I’d rather provide a guide to enable that founder learn the applicable frameworks and how to apply them in day-to-day decision-making situations.

Lesson #5: Create Internal Value By Increasing Organizational Capacity

The way we defined it; Organizational capacity is the harnessing of a company’s human, physical and material, financial, informational, and intellectual property resources in order to enable the company to continually perform above expectations and strengthen its competitive position.

In difficult times especially, it is important that companies do not lose sight of the need to continue to find ways to increase organizational capacity.

One way we did this, in both cases, was to shift both companies off MS Exchange Server and onto Google Docs for Work. This was not easy because of cultural attachments to MS Exchange and fear of having to learn something new. Both companies made the shift, eventually. The immediate benefit they experienced was a dramatic reduction in the costs they incurred for IT assistance. A more important, though less tangible benefit was that both businesses could then afford to give every full-time employee a corporate email address and access to a corporate intranet portal. The benefits were enormous; easier collaboration, easier information transfer and sharing,  and increased security of corporate information and trade secrets. Quicker turnaround on tactical decisions because people could now communicate by chat.

Given the improvements in tools for collaboration, we encouraged the formation of cross-disciplinary teams to tackle some of the problems that each company was dealing with. This allowed people from one area of each business to interact more closely with their colleagues from another area of the business. They developed a better understanding of one another, and of the challenges and constraints that they each faced in trying to execute their day-to-day responsibilities. In turn this fostered a more collaborative relationship across the entire organization. It also enhanced the learning environment for all employees.

How this applies to early-stage startups: It does not take a lot by way of resources to create an environment that is rich in opportunities for cross-functional collaboration and learning. This comes in handy during due diligence because every member of the team will be able to speak knowledgeably about the startup’s immediate and long term plans.

Lesson #6: Direction Must Be Set From The Top, But Engagement Must Begin at The Bottom

We started working on trying to develop a strategic plan for both companies in summer 2009. Before this time, neither company had previously had a coherent strategy.

In consultation with the executives in each company, the board of directors set out the broad areas that the strategic plans ought to cover; Finance, Operations, People, Demand Creation, and Expansion.

Once those had been agreed on, it was my job to meet with front-line employees as well as managers in the field in order to obtain data and insight about how the strategic plan would have to be set up in order to function effectively for them given what each company was trying to accomplish.

That sounds easy. It is not. It took multiple meetings, of several hours each. The restaurant had multiple locations in NYC, one location in NJ and another in CT. I did not visit the location in Chicago, the CFO held discussions with them during his quarterly visits. I had to sift through everything I heard during those meetings, and I had to extract broad themes. Then I had to reconcile that with the strategic framework established by the board. Finally, I had to interpret that information from the perspective of the competitive landscape for each of the two companies. Finally, I had to synthesize it all into digestible chunks for the board, the executives, the managers and rank-and-file employees.

The goal of spending so much time on having these meetings with people across all ranks in each company was to ensure that once the strategy was developed and implemented, there would be complete alignment behind the vision embodied in the strategy, and just as important that every employee would be engaged in and committed to executing the tactical initiatives required to make the strategy succeed.

How this applies to early-stage startups: The founder creates the vision that investors and the startup’s team buys into. The team executes to turn that vision into a living, breathing, growing reality. Investors hopefully act as a positive catalyst to help the process unfold more quickly.

Lesson #7: Do Not Ignore The Soft Issues, Emphasize Both Hard and Soft Issues Simultaneously

My experience might as well be called The Tale of Two Turnarounds. In one company leadership admitted things were awful. They also admitted that they could use whatever help I could offer. They readily admitted their limitations as a team. We had many instances of conflict, but starting from a position of optimism and a willingness to try, the process moved along slowly, but steadily. We created a survey that we administered twice a year to get a sense of how employees were feeling, data that might not be captured in the key performance metrics we monitored weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually.

We launched the strategic plan in January 2010 after 9 months of work specifically focused on that task. A year later the company made its first ever payments from a new profit-sharing plan that we had created as part of the new strategy. The payments were not huge, but they were evidence that the team’s hard work was paying off. It also created a feedback loop about how actions by employees affect the bottom-line performance of the company.

In the other company the founder, who was also the ceo, was grumpy and relatively uncooperative with investors. To cut a long story short, we launched the strategic plan in April 2010, after about 9 months of work specifically focused on that assignment. Within 6 months 75% of the managers with whom we had worked to develop and launch the strategic plan had left the company or had been fired. It was a classic case in which we would take two steps forward only to take four steps backward.

Morale dipped ever lower. The founders incessant talk about “a vision” and “a mission” became the butt of jokes among rank-and-file employees. It became clear that employees were becoming disillusioned with what the company stood for. While the company fared better than it would have if there had been no attempt at executing a turnaround and developing a strategy, it continued to perform well below its potential.

At a board meeting one day, the founder/ceo went into a vituperous rant about all the areas where the company was falling short. This was in early to mid 2012. I had to burst out in laughter. He might as well have been reciting problems whose solution formed the core of the strategic plan we created in 2010. Implementing that plan would have started the process of solving those problems he was so exercised about that day. We had lost two years for no good reason.

No amount of emphasis on key performance metrics made a difference. Without the founder’s full embrace of the strategic plan, nothing else mattered. I should point out that he had been intimately involved in crafting the strategic plan. This was not a plan that was forced down on him “from on high.” It became clear how badly things had deteriorated when a long time employee quit, this individual was the only employee at the company who had been there as long as the founder.

How this applies to early-stage startups: I am of a firm belief that the team is really important at the seed and series A stage, or at least until uncertainty around product market fit has been largely eliminated. So, I need to develop a sense that a founder is someone I can work with over the long haul . . . Actually, the kind of founder I am happy backing has to be someone I could envision myself working for if circumstances were different. Age, race, gender, religion . . . That is all irrelevant. Early in my process for assessing a startup I focus almost entirely on soft issues.

In one example, I sensed something amiss about the body language between 2 Spanish co-founders pitching a startup to my partner and I in 2013. I decided to tune out what they were saying in order to better observe their body language. There was something about their body language towards one another that did not align with what they wanted us to believe, in my opinion. We passed on their seed round, and decided to watch them till we could get more data about the relationship between the co-founders. That was nearly 3 years ago. I have heard no reports to suggest we made an error in that case.

Let chaos reign, then reign in chaos.

– Andy Grove, Only The Paranoid Survive

Lesson #8: Be Prepared For Chaos; Harness, Focus And Direct It, Empower People

Once employees understood the strategic plan as well as the tactical initiatives that accompanied it, they began developing ideas related to the various functional areas in each company and making suggestions to managers and excutives.

At first this was overwhelming . . . Managers had to do their own work, manage the work of the groups of people that they managed, and now . . . . They also had all these ideas being thrown at them from “left, right, and center.” The initial knee-jerk reaction was to try to “make it stop.”

That would have been a mistake. Among the deluge of ideas were some real gems.

For example, a maintenance department team member at the aviation company noticed that the company could cut down on its electricity usage by changing all the bulbs in its main hangar . . . No one had thought about that over the years, but our discussion about the strategic initiative around improving the product while reducing costs prompted him to take another look at the company’s hangars in search of opportunities to reduce operating costs. Thanks to improvements in technology over the years this was now a measure that could be implemented relatively easily.

In another instance, the team at our restaurant in CT had observed that on certain days of the week large groups of Chinese tourists visited the casino resort in which they are located. They had been thinking of a way to capture some of that business, but had assumed the corporate office would object to the menu changes they thought they had to make in order to execute that plan. As part of our implementation of the strategic initiative around increasing revenues, I suggested they conduct an experiment, analyze the outcome, and then seek assistance from the corporate office if the results looked promising. They did that, and saw a jump in revenues on two days of the week when business would otherwise have been slow. The corporate office gave its blessing, and assisted in making that practice more entrenched by using corporate resources to give it the polish required for company-supported initiatives.

How this applies to early-stage startups: A startup stops being a startup once its search for a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business model is complete. While that search is in process it is important that every member of the team feels empowered to contribute to the discovery of that business model. It can’t be the job of only some members of the team, it has to be part of everyone’s job. The faster a startup gets through the discovery process the better.

Lesson #9: The Turnaround Should Be Its Own Reward; Incentives Should Reinforce Change Not Drive It

It was nice to be able to make payments from the profit-sharing plan that we instituted. The payments were relatively small, yet they were tangible evidence to the employees, managers, and executives that they were collectively well equipped to make it through the ongoing turbulence and correct the mistakes of the past.

The sense of accomplishment employees felt translated into a number of things, among them;

  1. Newfound and increasing pride in being associated with a company that was succeeding where many of its rivals had failed.
  2. High levels of morale and optimism about the future of the company, and their place at the company. Less stress about employment security.
  3. A greater willingness to take the initiative in situations where the possibility of generating business for the company exists.

Basically, every employee was empowered to function as a salesperson on the company’s behalf. We arranged training sessions to equip every employee with the vocabulary they needed to understand in order to do that effectively. We also developed simple tools that they could use. They did not replace the company’s professional salespeople . . . They became an auxiliary sales force.

How this applies to early-stage startups: As startups grow, founders and early team members need to get better at the art and science of “managerial leverage” . . . What is managerial leverage? It is the process by which a manager creates output that far supersedes that manager’s input by using all the resources at the manager’s disposal to influence the work that is done by the group of people whose on-the-job effectiveness and work-output is affected by interactions with the manager.

What is a manager’s output? According to Andy Grove, co-founder and former CEO of Intel “The output of a manager is a result achieved by a group either under his supervision or under his influence.” Great managers create positive output that far exceeds expectations. Below average managers create output that fails to meet expectations given superior resources. Average managers? The team’s output would not be any different if the manager were absent.

The art of managerial leverage is in determining; how to apportion time, where to pay more attention, where to pay less attention, who to pay more attention to, who to pay less attention . . . . etc etc. The science of managerial leverage is in determining; what to measure, when to measure it, how often to monitor what is being measured, where bottlenecks are most likely to occur and why, and how to eliminate them . . . . etc etc.

Managerial leverage drives output. Output drives results. Results are measured and reflected in the KPI’s that founders and investors measure. Getting that order right is critical to a startup’s success.

Lesson #10: Learn To Listen, And Communicate Effectively

It is amazing how many problems can be solved relatively quickly if people would communicate more effectively internally and externally. Communication involves two actions; first listening actively in order to understand what is driving the actions of other people. Second, responding to what other people have said in a way that gets to the root cause of the problem being discussed.

During one of my field visits, I spent 8 hours on my first day listening to the executives talk about all the problems they each perceived, and how they felt the issues ought to be tackled. I spent that day with the CEO/President, the CFO, the Head of HR, and the Head of Sales. I encouraged open disagreement and debate.

On my second day I spent about the same amount of time speaking with the middle managers; again we discussed the problems they each perceived, and how they each felt the issues ought to be tackled.

On the third day I brought both groups together, and moderated an all day discussion about the problems the company was facing. Once again, I encouraged open disagreement and debate. Also, I put the inter-personal issues and conflicts that I had uncovered on the table. Things often got heated. It was my job to function as a pressure-release valve during those episodes. It was not pretty.

For example, I explained to the entire group how the CFO who was disliked by a large number of people within the company had made payroll on too many occasions by dipping into his personal 401(K) savings for example. The irony, the folks who disliked him routinely failed to provide the finance team with the data they needed in order to collect on accounts receivable from the company’s customers.

The outcome of this exercise was that;

  1. Everyone felt they had been given a chance to speak and be heard by the rest of the leadership team, and
  2. We discussed expectations in a fair amount of detail, enough so that more work could be done laying them out in adequate specificity rather than vaguely wondering what people could expect from one another, and finally
  3. Created an environment in which each member of the leadership team contributed in creating a communication framework against which they agreed to be held accountable

Our goals for the communication framework were that;

  1. Every employee should know what is expected of them, as individual team members,
  2. Every employee should know what to expect from every other member of the team,
  3. Employees should know what to expect from executives and managers, and lastly
  4. Accountability should be about improving team and company performance, not punishing individuals.

As Rosabeth Moss Kanter says in Four Tips for Building Accountability; “The tools of accountability — data, details, metrics, measurement, analyses, charts, tests, assessments, performance evaluations — are neutral. What matters is their interpretation, the manner of their use, and the culture that surrounds them. In declining organizations, use of these tools signals that people are watched too closely, not trusted, about to be punished. In successful organizations, they are vital tools that high achievers use to understand and improve performance regularly and rapidly.”

How this applies to early-stage startups: Startups typically have to move quickly, especially if they have taken in capital from institutional venture capitalists. A culture of blame, lack of cohesive teamwork, and a lack of organization-wide accountability is an insidious tumor that will eventually lead to failure. The founders who are most successful in the long run are those who do not shift responsibility when things are difficult, but instead serve as a model that other team members can emulate.

Closing Thoughts

Executing a turnaround and getting a startup through the phase of discovering a business model are really just two sides of the same coin. That experience has led me to the belief that it is when things seem bleak that great early stage investors prove their worth.

Further Reading

Blog Posts, Articles, & White Papers

  1. The Psychology of Change Management
  2. Motivating People: Getting Beyond Money
  3. The Irrational Side of Change Management
  4. The CEO’s Role in Leading Transformation
  5. The Role of Networks in Organizational Change
  6. All I Ever Needed To Know About Change Management I Learned at Engineering School
  7. Changing an Organization’s Culture, Without Resistance or Blame

Books

  1. High Output Management
  2. Only The Paranoid Survive
  3. How Did That Happen?
  4. HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Change Management
  5. HBR on Turnarounds

A Story About Startup Cofounder Teamwork: Climbing To The Summit of Denali

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Denali Image Credit: NPS Photo/Tim Rains
Denali
Image Credit: NPS Photo/Tim Rains

On June 30th, 2015, Naira Musallam and her climbing partner, Tim Lawton successfully summited Denali (Mount McKinley). They made history as The First Arab-American Team to ever do so. Naira also became the first Arab woman to stand on the summit of Denali.

Standing at 20,320 feet, Denali is one of the “Seven Summits” because it is the highest point on the continent of North America. From that point Naira and Tim raised a flag with the message “Peace and Security for All” written in Arabic, Hebrew, and English.

I checked my email around 8:00 AM EST in NYC after arriving at work on Tuesday, July 7th 2015, and found a note from Naira telling me the good news. She had sent it at 6:51 AM. I wrote back to congratulate her, and asked if I could write about their story. She and Tim graciously said yes.

This is their story. It highlights everything I discussed in Innovation Footprints: 6 Things I Have Learned About Building High-Performing Teams.

Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton at the summit of Denali on June 30th, 2015. (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)
Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton at the summit of Denali on June 30th, 2015. (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)

I met Naira on Thursday, October 9th 2014 when I was at NYU’s Leslie eLab to lead a lunch and learn. I had arrived early, to give myself some time to work through my nerves – I get super nervous about speaking in front of groups of people.

Naira was the first person to arrive. She came, said hello, and introduced herself. I introduced myself, and asked if she was an undergraduate student, what year she was in, what major she was studying . . . She smiled at me and explained she’s a professor at NYU, and she teaches statistics. Oh, lest I forget. She also mentioned that she “climbs mountains as a hobby” and “runs long distance, as a hobby.”

I thought to myself; “Great! It really would have been helpful if someone had warned me that I’d have professors in the audience! Never mind mathematicians who climb mountains and run long distance races . . . as a hobby.”

So much for calming my nerves. It seemed to me that her arrival was timed to optimize the intimidation factor. Any way, the talk went well – or, so she says. To my great “horror” there are excerpts on video which you can check out here, here, here and here. After the event, I chatted briefly with Naira again and we agreed to meet for coffee. She wanted to pick my brains about something she was working on. Since I have never met a mathematician or physicist I do not like, I said yes. What could be better than chatting with a mathematician?

We met again on November 26th, 2014 at Cafe Reggio near NYU. After spending some time getting to know one another from a biographical standpoint, we spent most of the time discussing many of the types of questions I have come to expect from the first-time founders I meet; What does a VC want to see in order to decide to make an investment? How does the decision-making process typically work? How about fund-raising, how does that work, in general? How does one get a meeting with a VC to whom one does not have a direct or indirect connection? Does sending a cold-email work? And many more.

During subsequent meetings over coffee, and sometimes lunch . . . I learned about a startup she and Tim have been building, Frontier7 is an online data analytics platform. I also learned a lot about Tim, whom I had not yet met.

Eventually, I met Tim . . . I pointed out to Tim that Naira intimidated me when I first met her, and now she’d brought him along to escalate that intimidation factor even more. I remember we were all laughing so hard, the other folks in the bar must have thought we’d been drinking too much.

Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: Starting The Climb on Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)
Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: Starting The Climb on Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)

About Naira Musallam

Naira is currently a full-time professor at New York University, where she teaches Applied Statistics, Analytical Skills, and National Security and Middle East Affairs at the Center for Global Affairs. She also serves as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and in its collaborative program at the United States Military Academy at West Point where she teaches graduate level research courses. Naira received her doctorate from Columbia University.

She has over thirteen years of applied research experience consulting with multiple industries in the private sector, ranging from financial services, to pharmaceuticals, retail, oil and gas, and the fashion industry, helping them solve business problems through data driven processes. She used applied statistics to develop insights on business issues such as M&A deals, C-Suite executive assessments, employee retention, and sales strategies. She also consulted to governmental agencies and non-profit organizations on projects related to project assessment, and monitoring and evaluation. Naira is the recipient of multiple research awards from the Earth Institute, Columbia University, and the U.S. Department of State.

Naira grew up in a small Palestinian town in Galilee, and has been climbing for the last seven years. When not working in New York City on statistical issues, she enjoys high altitude mountain climbing, scuba diving, and cultural exploration and adventures around the world.

About Tim Lawton

Tim is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and served 5 1/2 years as an officer in various infantry and special operations units. During his time in the Army he was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan for a total of four combat tours. After leaving the military he attended MIT Sloan School of Management where he received an MBA with a concentration in corporate finance. He spent the next 5 years in investment banking with experience in debt restructuring, equity financing, and mergers & acquisitions in one role and helped to lead a sales effort in another.

As an active member of the veteran community in NYC, Tim is involved with various veteran non-profit organizations and is working to further veteran’s business initiatives in the city. He is originally from the Boston area. His hobbies include mountain climbing, travel, sky diving, scuba diving, and working out.

How They Met

“We first met at a 5k road race that was to support a veteran’s organization that we were both connected to. We had struck up a conversation because we were both wearing the same brand of sunglasses, which are unique mainly to mountain climbers. From then on we continued our friendship and over time began to discuss not only future mountain climbing endeavors, but also a potential business idea that leveraged both of our experiences from the corporate world.”

Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: Camp on Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)
Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: Camp on Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)

Why They Thought They’d Make A Good Team

We both suck at different things.

“In all seriousness, since we initially began our friendship due to mountain climbing and had subsequently climbed together in Ecuador before starting in business together we both had to learn how to trust each other on a different level than is typically required in business and cursory friendships. On that trip we realized that we could trust and rely on each other when things don’t go smoothly.

In one particular recent event while we were climbing together in Alaska, Tim was leading up a steep slope when the ice gave out and he began to tumble down the mountain. As they were connected via a climbing rope, Naira quickly reacted and began to self-arrest. By the time Tim had also recovered enough to self-arrest and stop his fall they had both fallen about 100 feet and 80 feet respectively.  It is this type of event that engrains a level of trust in another’s competence that can be carried over to any other type of situation.

On the actual business front, we both realized that we possessed very different, yet complementary skill sets. Once we began to develop the business plan and put together a strategy, coupled with the trust we had gained with each other from the mountains, we knew we could both move ahead with different responsibilities, yet towards achieving the very same goal.”

Three Things That Have Been Important To Their Success as a Team

  1. Trust,
  2. Complementary skill sets, and
  3. Sharing and believing in the same vision

What successfully Summiting Denali Means for Each One of Them

Tim: “For me it was the culmination of an idea and vision that began years before. In the mountains, it should be about the journey, but getting to the summit is always a sweet addition. This particular mountain and successful summit was by far the most complex and difficult in all aspects as it required more planning and preparation than other mountains I had climbed. Plus, we had spent so long this year attempting to get there. It took two trips, two cross-continental round trip flights, sleeping in airports, hotels, and tents, but we did it. We spent 35 days on the mountain during those two trips. So to have been denied the summit once before, but continuing to try and having the mindset of not quitting until we succeed, and then to succeed, is a great feeling. To have achieved that with Naira, with a mindset that we also share in business makes it satisfying as we look to apply the same tenacity to our new business venture.”

Naira: “While being able to say that I became the First Arab woman to climb Denali has its significance in the mountaineering world, the climbing of Denali with Tim took much deeper meaning for several reasons: Tim and I were the first American- Arab team to step on the highest point in North America. The ability to share a message of hope from there together, especially in today’s turbulent world was extremely unique. In addition, it was elating to reach the top with Tim because we have failed in the past to reach the top. Success becomes way more enjoyable when you achieve it with the same person you failed with before. Finally, reaching the top and being able to make history would absolutely not have been possible without Tim’s partnership and competence on the mountain. In that regards, I feel truly blessed to have Tim as partner.”

Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: View From The Top of Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)
Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: View From The Top of Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)

Their Shared-Vision for Frontier7, The Significance of The Name

“The name Frontier7, which certainly didn’t come to us quickly, has a number of meanings for us. First of all, we are both in love with the outdoors and adventure, so ‘frontier’ in the sense of the furthest known boundary, the last frontier, the beginning of the unexplored, etc. appealed to us. In business we wanted to create an analytics platform that helped push our clients to the frontier of their industries. The “7” has many meanings that we both value: in most cultures 7 is a lucky number, 7 wonders of the world, 7 summits, 7 colors in the rainbow, in Eastern thought the 7th Chakra is the center for trust, devotion, inspiration, happiness, and positivity. (There are also 7 dwarfs in Snow White and who doesn’t love Snow White?)”

Our vision for Frontier7 is to be the go-to online platform for seamless analytics. We want to enable companies to be able to unlock all of the value of the data they gather in order to maximize their own business performance.

The Announcement They Sent To Their Friends, and Other Associates

On June 30th, 2015, Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton made history together on the highest point of North America, Denali (also known as Mount McKinley) by summiting as the First Arab-American Team to ever do so, and with Naira becoming the first Arab woman to ever stand on the summit. Denali is one of the “Seven Summits” or highest point on the continent of North America, standing at 20,320 feet. From the highest point in North America they raised a flag with the message “Peace and Security for All” written in Arabic, Hebrew, and English.

Their goal to summit Denali began on May 4th, 2015 when they attempted to climb the mountain with a guided group but were unable to due to severe weather conditions, spending a total of 18 days on the mountain. While it would be normal for them to come back another season to attempt the mountain again, they decided to return only a few weeks later in June. The second and successful attempt was a self-guided climb with just the team of the two of them. They raised their flag on the summit after 13 days and took a full 17 days on the mountain. The two months, two cross-continental round trips, red eye flights, sleeping in airports, tents, and hotels, and 35 total days on the mountain was well worth the effort on the evening of June 30th, 2015.

What makes their story even more unique is that they come from significantly different backgrounds. Naira grew up as a Palestinian in Israel where she spent a significant amount of time working in the conflict field, while Tim grew up in Massachusetts, served in the United States Army and served numerous combat tours overseas. They connected because of their love for mountaineering, and drive to send a message about hope, interdependence, and common human values.

Furthermore, today they are also co-founders of a data analytics company, Frontier7 (www.frontier7.com), and are also in the process of starting a non-profit in the form of a social platform that engineers chance for people by connecting those from varied backgrounds and shared passions (like themselves) and aligning people, ideas, and resources for them to address social issues that they care about. They believe that in today’s reality, this message becomes more important than ever.

My Closing  Thoughts

We’ve had numerous discussions about Frontier7, but I have not yet seen a demo. They assure me that day is coming soon. Either way, I am eager to watch their journey, as co-founders and as people who have a vision that they wish to turn into a reality. They each embody the intangible characteristics I look for in founders; courage, grit, vision, determination, resilience, creativity, resourcefulness, conflict management and resolution, discipline, a willingness to assume responsibility, and the ability to learn from others. I could not feel more proud of their accomplishment.

Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: At The Top of Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)
Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: At The Top of Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)

6 Things I Have Learned About Building High-Performing Teams

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Chelsea FC - Celebrating victory in the 2012 UEFA Champions League. Image Credit: Chelsea FC
Chelsea FC – Celebrating victory in the 2012 UEFA Champions League. Image Credit: Chelsea FC

I spend a lot of time thinking about teamwork; how teams function, how they operate, how they fail or succeed, and how the most successful teams make their success repeatable in the face of changing conditions. This post is my attempt to synthesize what I have learned so far. 1Let me know if you feel I have failed to attribute something appropriately. Tell me how to fix the error, and I will do so. I regret any mistakes in quoting from my sources.

What is a team? For the purpose of this blog post I will define a team as: A group of people with complementary skills who choose to work collaboratively together towards accomplishing a shared vision and a common objective, within an environment of mutual support in which each team member is empowered to independently set goals, solve problems and make decisions with support from other members of the team, based on an agreed-upon framework, under severe resource constraints.

A team will perform better than an individual in situations where the task at hand can only be completed through:

  1. the creation of new knowledge, or
  2. a novel and unique application of existing knowledge, or
  3. the meshing of different disciplines and subject matter areas, and
  4. there isn’t a single person who possesses all the knowledge and skills that would be required to accomplish the task within a period of time acceptable to the parties involved.

The presence of the following phenomena help us identify a team 2Adapted from Group Behavior, accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at https://www.boundless.com/psychology/textbooks/boundless-psychology-textbook/social-psychology-20/social-influence-104/group-behavior-393-12928/

  1. Interdependence and Social interaction: Team members depend one one another in order to meet the teams goals and objectives, their interdependence results in social interaction through communication with one another.
  2. Perception of a group and Commonality of Purpose: Team members agree they are part of the team, and they buy into the team’s purpose, its goals, and its objectives.
  3. Favoritism: Members of the group demonstrate positive prejudice towards one another, and discriminate in favor of other members of the team.

In research using Letters-to-Numbers Problems, a task-grouping that combines elements of hypothesis testing, mathematical and logical reasoning, cryptographic reasoning, and collective induction: Groups of size three, four, and five performed better than the best of an equivalent number of individuals, but groups of size two performed at the level of the best of two individuals. Groups of size three, four, and five performed better than groups of size two but did not differ from each other. These results suggest that groups of size three are necessary and sufficient to perform better than the best of an equivalent number of individuals on intellective problems. 3“Groups Perform Better Than the Best Individuals on Letters-to-Numbers Problems: Effects of Group Size”, Patrick Laughlin, Erin Hatch, Jonathan Silver, and Lee Boh, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 90, No. 4. Accessed online on Jun 27, 2015.

Other research found that: “Groups are better than individuals in making difficult decisions, but the opposite effect is found when decisions are easy. The model suggests that the reason lies in the different assessment mechanisms operating at the level of individuals and colonies. For a difficult choice, solitary ants have a relatively high probability of accepting the worse nest, because they rely on quality dependent acceptance probabilities that differ little for similar nests. Successive comparisons cause these probabilities to diverge, but the ant is likely to make her decision before this slow process has had much effect. Whole colonies, on the other hand, do much better at difficult choices, because they use social information to accentuate the quality difference between sites. Rather than rely on individual comparisons, the colony’s choice emerges from a competition between recruitment efforts. Recruitment generates positive feedback on the number of ants at each site, with the better site slightly favored by its higher acceptance rate. The quorum rule amplifies this difference, allowing the colony to settle on the better site more frequently.” 4Takao Sasaki et al, Ant Colonies Outperform Individuals When A Sensory Discrimination Task is Difficult But Not When it is Easy.Proceedings of the National Science Academy of Sciences of the United States 2013 110(34). Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at http://www.pnas.org/content/110/34/13769.full.pdf+html

The importance of the team that is working to build a startup cannot be overstated. The team is the most important aspect of a startup during the earliest stages of its existence, while it is searching for a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business model. Once that business model has been found, the startup has a better chance of surviving team instability. Before that, team instability can be fatal. Also, the traits of the people in that early team determine the culture of the company that might evolve out of that startup.

Lesson # 1 – Every team goes through Development Stages: Bruce W. Tuckman’s model of how groups form is the foundational work on which our understanding of how teams develop and function is built. His paper ‘Developmental sequence in small groups’ was first published in 1965. 5Tuckman, Bruce W. (1965) ‘Developmental sequence in small groups’, Psychological Bulletin, 63, 384-399.

  1. Forming: “Groups initially concern themselves with orientation accomplished primarily through testing. Such testing serves to identify the boundaries of both interpersonal and task behaviors. Coincident with testing in the interpersonal realm is the establishment of dependency relationships with leaders, other group members, or pre-existing standards. It may be said that orientation, testing and dependence constitute the group process of forming.”
  2. Storming: “The second point in the sequence is characterized by conflict and polarization around interpersonal issues, with concomitant emotional responding in the task sphere. These behaviors serve as resistance to group influence and task requirements and may be labeled as storming.”
  3. Norming: “Resistance is overcome in the third stage in which in-group feeling and cohesiveness develop, new standards evolve, and new roles are adopted. In the task realm, intimate, personal opinions are expressed. Thus, we have the stage of norming.”
  4. Performing: “the group attains the fourth and final stage in which interpersonal structure becomes the tool of task activities. Roles become flexible and functional, and group energy is channeled into the task. Structural issues have been resolved, and structure can now become supportive of task performance. This stage can be labeled as performing.”
  5. Adjourning or Mourning: This stage is experienced by teams that go through the process of dissolution; planned or unplanned, voluntary or involuntary. It was added to the preceding four stages in 1977.

Lesson #2 – To sustain success, leadership matters: Anita Elberse conducted research on Manchester United Football Club’s legendary leader, Sir Alex Ferguson. About Sir Alex Ferguson, she writes “Some call him the greatest coach in history. Before retiring in May 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson spent 26 seasons as the manager of Manchester United, the English football (soccer) club that ranks among the most successful and valuable franchises in sports. During that time the club won 13 English league titles along with 25 other domestic and international trophies—giving him an overall haul nearly double that of the next-most-successful English club manager.” Following are some observations based on her research. 6Anita Elberse, Ferguson’s Formula. HBR October 2013 Issue accessed on Jun 27 at https://hbr.org/2013/10/fergusons-formula. Also, Anita Elberse and Thomas Dye, Sir Alex Ferguson: Managing Manchester United. Harvard Business School Case N9-513-051, Sep 2012.

  1. Sir Alex Ferguson on building an organization that will last, starting with the foundation: “From the moment I got to Manchester United, I thought of only one thing: building a football club. I wanted to build right from the bottom. That was in order to create fluency and a continuity of supply to the first team. With this approach, the players all grow up together, producing a bond that, in turn, creates a spirit.”
  2. Successful teams are led by people who set high standards, and hold everyone accountable to meeting and even exceeding those standards: “He recruited what he calls “bad losers” and demanded that they work extremely hard. Over the years this attitude became contagious—players didn’t accept teammates’ not giving it their all. The biggest stars were no exception.”
  3. Team leaders, and other team members, should encourage one another as often as possible, especially when a team member’s effort has matched or exceeded the group’s expectations. Sir Alex Ferguson: “Few people get better with criticism; most respond to encouragement instead. So I tried to give encouragement when I could. For a player—for any human being—there is nothing better than hearing “Well done.” Those are the two best words ever invented. You don’t need to use superlatives.”
  4. The most successful teams prepare to win. Under Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United was always prepared to adapt its tactical play in order to increase its chances of winning the game; how to play if a goal was needed in the late stages of a match, training to force a favorable outcome when the going got tough. They used training sessions as opportunities to learn and improve. Sir Alex Ferguson: “Winning is in my nature. I’ve set my standards over such a long period of time that there is no other option for me—I have to win. I expected to win every time we went out there. Even if five of the most important players were injured, I expected to win. Other teams get into a huddle before the start of a match, but I did not do that with my team. Once we stepped onto the pitch before a game, I was confident that the players were prepared and ready to play, because everything had been done before they walked out onto the pitch.”
Denali Image Credit: NPS Photo/Tim Rains
Denali
Image Credit: NPS Photo/Tim Rains

Lesson #3 – Great teams learn how to adapt their leadership structure to match the intensity and difficulty of the task at hand: In a study of 5,104 mountain-climbing expeditions that took place between 1905 and 2012 on more than 100 mountains around the world, researchers found that: “In sum, hierarchical cultural values predicted summiting and fatality rates only for group expeditions. Hierarchy did not predict summiting or fatality rates in solo expeditions, providing evidence that group processes are a critical driver of the observed effects.” 7Eric M. Anicich et al, Hierarchical Cultural Values Predict Success and Mortality in High-Stakes Teams. Proceedings of the National Science Academy of Sciences of the United States 2015 112(5). Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at http://media.outsideonline.com/documents/himalaya-expedition-study.pdf. In other words, groups characterized by a higher degree of “command-and-control” style leadership – and a lower degree of egalitarian leadership, were more likely to summit but also faced more deaths than groups with a higher degree of egalitarian leadership – and a lower degree of command-and-control style leadership. Commenting on the study, Cecilia Ridgeway, a professor at Stanford University observed that: 8Devon O’Neil, Summit or Death! Accessed on Jun 27 at http://www.outsideonline.com/1928751/summit-or-death

  1. The crucial factor in a team’s success or failure under conditions such as those the researchers examined is the leader’s competence. Perhaps that competence is compromised in certain situations due to ingrained social structures, norms and behavioral patterns.
  2. Egalitarian teams are better positioned to survive in the face of potentially dooming conditions which would overwhelm the single decision maker in a non-egalitarian team. “The reason for that is when they hit these complex situations, under best circumstances they share their information, the ideas bounce off, and they come up with things that none of them would have thought of alone about how to survive.”

Related questions raised by this study:

  1. How can a team find an optimal balance between egalitarianism and non-egalitarianism, and
  2. How can the team learn to identify the situations in which it should adopt one leadership approach over the other?

Cecilia Ridgeway offers this advice: “The team would have to know itself well and all the members would really have to trust one another and be willing to go with their boss but also pull back from that in a kind of kaleidoscopic way. It’s not impossible but it wouldn’t be easy to do. It would depend a lot on the interpersonal skills, not just the climbing skills, of everybody involved.”

The best teams shift fluidly from one organizational form to another, depending on the circumstance, and depending on the nature of the task at hand. This is a function of the effectiveness of the team’s leadership, and reflects the complex nature of the environment in which startups and other businesses operate today.

  1. Teams can be organized such that interaction between each member and the team leader is the key characteristic of how the team gets its work done. The degree of collaboration between team members is low. The effectiveness of a team organized in this way is largely dependent on the effectiveness of the team leader.
  2. They may be organized such that responsibilities are shared to a large extent, with each team member exerting significant authority and decision-making responsibility for some aspect of the team’s work. Team leadership is not a shared responsibility. The degree of collaboration is high.
  3. A team can also be self-directed, with no official leader. However, such a team will often have one person responsible for coordinating the activities of team members.

Lesson #4 – Great teams are made up of people who each strive for true mastery in their area of specialization. The greatest soccer teams usually have players who each would be selected amongst the very best players in the world for the position that they fill on the team. 9On such teams young players must commit to trying to become one of the best, and the example must be set by the more experienced members of the team. To become the best each member of the team must hold a worldview that is keeping with what the Japanese describe as Shokunin kishitsu (職人気質) – translated roughly as the “craftsman spirit” and commit to the following five principles: 10Adapted from Garr Reynold’s Shokunin Kishitsu & The Five Elements of True Mastery. Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2015/05/the-five-secrets-to-mastery.html

  1. They must be committed to the art, and committed to always functioning in their role on the team at the highest possible level. Commitment to hard work, and dedication to consistently executing at a high level is what sets great teams apart from their peers.
  2. They must aspire to improve themselves and their work, individually and collectively.
  3. They must pay attention to the cleanliness and freshness of their work environment. “Work environment” applies to the physical space in which the team gets its work done, but it also applies to the intangible work environment; Do team members feel free to express opinions that might be unpopular without fear of the consequences? Does every member of the team feel a sense of belonging and inclusiveness? Have cliques formed within the team, how does this affect the team’s overall effectiveness?
  4. The team’s leader is stubborn and obstinate in the pursuit of excellence. This does not mean that the leader has to be a jerk towards other members of the team, but it implies that the team’s standards for excellence, its vision, its mission . . . those are not sacrificed for the sake of consensus building.
  5. They each must be passionate and enthusiastic about mastering their skill, and in doing so they each cause their team to improve and become every day. They must be passionate about their individual and collective pursuit of perfection.

Lesson #5 – A team should strive to become collectively more intelligent than any single member of that team could be acting alone. 

  1. Gender diversity helps, or find team members with high social sensitivity. Researchers assigned subjects randomly into teams after each individual had been administered a standard intelligence test, and then the researchers asked the teams to solve several tasks which included brianstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles, as well as one complex problem. The team’s collective intelligence was scored on the basis of their performance on the tasks. Teams with members with higher IQs did not perform much better than the other teams. However, teams that had more women did. The researchers suggest that the higher social sensitivity of women relative to men, explains the higher scores attained by teams with more women. Teams that include people who have high social sensitivity will perform teams that do not. 11Anita Wooley and Thomas W. Malone, What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women. Harvard Business Review, Jun 2011. Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at https://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/ar/1
  2. In the face of complex problems, teams that solve the problem together will improve their chances of success over teams that rely on a star individual performer. “Swarm intelligence, which brings to mind the image of a hive of bees working together, requires people to gather information independently, process and combine it in social interactions, and use it to solve cognitive problems, according to behavioral biologist Jens Krause.  It has an advantage over other systems in that individuals get the opportunity to lead the swarm and affect what it does.  Moreover, because people act collectively, they can consider more factors, come up with more solutions, and make better decisions.” There are 4 things teams can do to accomplish this: 12Wolfgang Jenewein et al, Learning Collaboration from Tiki-Taka Soccer. Harvard Business Review, Jul 2014. Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at https://hbr.org/2014/07/learning-collaboration-from-tika-taka-soccer/
    1. Create a common vision,
    2. Leaders should be teachers, not bosses,
    3. Set collective objectives, and
    4. Leaders must be full-time leaders.
  3. Create, maintain, and nurture the team’s identity. Together with culture, identity can provide a powerful means of driving performance. Identity is different from culture. Identity tells a team “who we are.” Culture tells the team “what we do” or “how we behave.” 13Andres Hatum and Luciana Silvestri, What Makes FC Barcelona Such a Successful Business? Harvard Business Review, Jun 16 2015. Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at https://hbr.org/2015/06/what-makes-fc-barcelona-such-a-successful-business

A good team has learned how to make one plus one equal two. A great team has learned how to make one plus one equal three.

Lesson # 6 – In order to sustain performance teams should be aware of the problems related to intra-group collaboration and intra-group creativity. 

  1. The process of collaboration can lead teams to perform worse than an individual. Julia A. Minson and Jennifer S. Mueller found that teamwork can exacerbate overconfidence, and lead team members to reject outside information. 14Julia A. Minson and Jennifer S. Mueller, The Cost of Collaboration: Why Joint Decision Making Exacerbates Rejection of Outside Information. Psychological Science, Mar 16, 2012. Accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/DPlab/papers/publishedPapers/Minson_2011_The%20cost%20of%20collaboration.pdf
    1. The study examined the assumption that collaboration leads to superior decisions than decisions made by an individual.
    2. The study found that teams of two people were more reluctant to change their judgements when presented with new information than an individual working alone. As a result the teams made poorer decisions than they would have if they had more willingly incorporated outside information in their decision making.
    3. The researchers found that teams’ tended to be more confident in the inherent ability of the team to reach a decision without outside input, this led them to be less willing to accept outside information. They suggest that the process of collaboration itself, not the quality of collaboration, makes team members over-confident in their collective expertise and leads to the higher degree of rejection of outside input.
    4. This is especially detrimental when the team is confronting a novel problem or task, but fails to explore alternatives that might lead to an improved decision.
  2. The best teams are those in which each member of the team shares the same team mental model, and the team mental model is correct. Beng-Chong Lim and Katherine J. Klein found that team performance is enhanced when team members share the same mental model. 15Beng-Chong Lim and Katherine J. Klein, Team mental Models and Team Performance: A Field Study of The Effects of Team Mental Model Similarity and Accuracy.J. Organiz. Behav. 27, 403–418 (2006) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/job.387. Accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at http://www-management.wharton.upenn.edu/klein/documents/Lim_Klein_Team_mental_models_2006.pdf
    1. A mental model is “a ‘mechanism whereby humans generate descriptions of system purpose and form, explanations of system functioning and observed system states, and predictions of future system states.’ Mental models are organized knowledge frameworks that allow individuals to describe, explain, and predict behavior. Mental models specify relevant knowledge content as well as the relationships between knowledge components. An individual’s mental model (of, for example, a car, a disease, or a process such as child development) reflects the individual’s perception of reality.”
    2. They found “a direct relationship between team mental model similarity and team performance. This may reflect the context in which the teams that we studied are trained to operate. They are expected to perform under high stress and intense time pressure. Under such circumstances, there is very little time for explicit coordination and communication. To succeed in their tasks (e.g., reacting to an enemy’s ambush), team members must have a shared understanding of the emerging situation and the collective action required. It is precisely in this type of context that shared mental models have been hypothesized to be most predictive of team performance.” Mental model similarity is a measure of the degree to which each team member’s perception of reality differs from the perception of other individuals on the team.
    3. They also found “that team mental model accuracy is also instrumental for team performance. Teams whose average mental models were most similar to experts’ mental models performed better than did teams whose average mental models were less similar to experts’ mental models. We speculate that teams whose mental models were most accurate pursued more effective task performance strategies than did teams whose mental models were less accurate.” In other words, the more correct a team’s mental model, the better the team performed. 16Coincidentally, this is an area of investigation I often pursue when I study early stage startups – does the startup team’s mental model match the mental model that customers have of the startup? What are the implications if it does not?
  3. The team might fail to benefit from the knowledge of its most knowledgeable member because of pressure to conform with the majority position.  In 1956 Solomon E Asch found that even when one member of a team is more knowledgeable than the rest of the team about a specific task, that individual might choose to agree with the team even if the team is wrong, and that individual would have disagreed with the team’s decision under different circumstances. This happens because that individual feels pressure to conform with the team’s position. This is especially the case if that individual’s self-perception of the power-dynamic on the team places that individual in a position of weakness which makes it advantageous for that individual to protect the social relationships that exist between that individual and the other members of the team. 17Solomon E. Asch, Studies of Independence and Conformity: 1. A Minority of One Against A Unanimous Majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, Vol. 70, No. 9, Whole No. 416, 1956. Accessed online on Jun 28, 2015. I have saved a copy here Minority v. Majority – asch1956. A more accessible discussion of Samuel Asch’s research on Decision Making and Social Conformity can be found here
  4. The behavioral biases present in individual team members can be amplified within a group setting, particularly, the biases of dominant group members can become amplified by the group. Behavioral psychology is the study of observable and quantifiable aspects of human behavior. Behavioral biases refer to the tendency that people have to behave in certain ways under certain conditions. Behavioral biasescan be divided into two groups; Cognitive biases and Emotional biases. Anindividual’s behavioral biases can interfere with that person’sdecision making, and cause theindividual to makesuboptimal choices. The impact behavioral biases have on the quality ofdecision makingcan be worse in the context of a group asindividual team members might have a multiplying effect on oneanothers’ biases instead of reducing bias within the group. For example, two over-confident people might form a team that exhibits a higher degree of overconfidence than either individual acting alone. 18Adapted from Group Behavior, accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at https://www.boundless.com/psychology/textbooks/boundless-psychology-textbook/social-psychology-20/social-influence-104/group-behavior-393-12928/ 
    1. Groupthink occurs when teams make consistently suboptimal decisions because members of the team have a strong desire to maintain harmony within the group. Groupthink can lead the team to consistently reject creative ideas.
    2. Groupshift occurs when the group adopts a position that is more extreme than the position that any of the individual members of the team would have taken. It is the example I described above of a team of individually overconfident people forming a team that is even more extreme in its overconfidence than any single individual member of the team would be if acting alone, under any circumstance.
    3. Deindividuation occurs as the group gradually becomes self-unaware as individual members of the group engage in less self-evaluation and self-critiquing, subsuming their self-awareness in the face of the behavior of the group. This phenomenon is exemplified in the real world through phenomena like lynch mobs, peaceful demonstrations that turn violent for no identifiable or obvious reason, or groups that form spontaneously and cause destruction, say while celebrating a sport’s teams victory in some sports tournament like the FIFA World Cup.
  5. As a team grows individuals in the team can perform worse than they would have if they were acting alone. Jennifer S. Mueller found that as teams grow larger the performance of individuals on the team can suffer because the social bonds between members of the team grow weaker. In her study relational loss outweighed extrinsic motivational loss and perceived coordination loss in explaining the tendency for individuals on large teams to perform worse. Relational loss is a measure of the likelihood of one team member to obtain task-related help from another team member when it is needed. Extrinsic motivation is the tendency of team members to perform actions because of the likelihood of recognition from  other members of the team. Coordination loss is the tendency for team members to become less capable of taking synchronistic action towards completing a task as the team grows. She states: “This study identifies that, in modern contexts, coordination losses and motivation losses provide an incomplete story in explaining why individuals in larger teams perform worse. Instead, the current study shows that relational losses play an important role in explaining why individuals experience performance losses in larger teams. Better understanding of process in larger teams moves the field past an obsession with finding the ‘‘optimal team size,’’ a line of questioning which has yielded little understanding about performance in larger groups. Indeed, the optimal team size may be completely dependent upon the exact nature of the group task which may have as many variations as there are teams. Focusing on process also moves the field past blanket recommendations to simply keep group sizes small. The reality is that managers tend to bias their team size towards overstaffing, and theory would suggest that larger teams have more potential productivity that can lead organizations to increased competitive advantage if managed correctly. 19Mueller, J. S. Why individuals in larger teams perform worse. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (2011), doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.08.004. Accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at https://1318d3f964915c298476-71207924aec76187d46cf4d3ee8ac05a.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/or-mueller_2012_obhdp_why-indivdiuals-in-larger-teams-perform-worse.pdf
  6. Individual team members, and thus teams in general can have an implicit bias against creative ideas. The best teams are those that recognize this and introduce mechanisms to guard against discarding creative ideas that later go on to become the basis for phenomenally successful products and businesses. A study by Jennifer S. Mueller, Shimul Mewani and Jack A. Goncalo suggests that this might happen because people and teams try to reduce uncertainty, and creative ideas are those that confront us with extreme uncertainty.

Concluding Thoughts

If you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far go together.

The Big 5 of Team Work and The Coordinating Mechanisms of Teamwork: In Is There a “Big Five” in Teamwork? Eduardo Salas, Dana E. Sims and C. Shawn Burke provide a helpful summary of The Big Five and the Coordinating Mechanisms of Team Work. I am reproducing part of that summary below. 20Eduardo Salas, Dana E. Sims and C. Shawn Burke, Is There a “Big Five” in Teamwork?SMALL GROUP RESEARCH, Vol. 36 No. 5, October 2005 555-599 DOI: 10.1177/1046496405277134. Accessed on June 29, 2015 at http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/INF5181/h14/artikler-teamarbeid/salas_etal_2005_is_there_a_big_five_in_teamwork—copy.pdf. I have saved the relevant pages Salas et al – Big 5 in Team Work.

The Big Five of Teamwork

  1. Team Leadership
    1. Definition: Ability to direct and coordinate the activities of other team members, assess team performance, assign tasks, develop team knowledge, skills, and abilities, motivate team members, plan and organize, and establish a positive atmosphere.
    2. Behavioral Markers: Facilitate team problem solving. Provide performance expectations and acceptable interaction patterns. Synchronize and combine individual team member contributions. Seek and evaluate information that affects team functioning. Clarify team member roles. Engage in preparatory meetings and feedback sessions with the team.
  2. Team Orientation
    1. Definition: Propensity to take other’s behavior into account during group interaction and the belief in the importance of team goal’s over individual members’ goals.
    2. Behavioral Markers: Taking into account alternative solutions provided by teammates and appraising that input to determine what is most correct. Increased task involvement, information sharing, strategizing, and participatory goal setting
  3. Shared Mental Models
    1. Definition: An organizing knowledge structure of the relationships among the task the team is engaged in and how the team members will interact.
    2. Behavioral Markers: Anticipating and predicting each other’s needs. Identify changes in the team, task, or teammates and implicitly adjusting strategies as needed.
  4. Mutual Trust
    1. Definition: The shared belief that team members will perform their roles and protect the interests of their teammates.
    2. Behavioral Markers: Information sharing. Willingness to admit mistakes and accept feedback.
  5. Closed-loop Communication
    1. Definition: The exchange of information between a sender and a receiver irrespective of the medium.
    2. Behavioral Markers: Following up with team members to ensure message was received. Acknowledging that a message was received. Clarifying with the sender of the message that the message received is the same as the intended message.

The Coordinating Mechanisms of Teamwork

  1. Mutual Performance Monitoring
    1. Definition: The ability to develop common understandings of the team environment and apply appropriate task strategies to accurately monitor teammate performance.
    2. Behavioral Markers:Identifying mistakes and lapses in other team members’ actions. Providing feedback regarding team member actions to facilitate self-correction.
  2. Backup Behavior
    1. Definition: Ability to anticipate other team members’ needs through accurate knowledge about their responsibilities. This includes the ability to shift workload among members to achieve balance during high periods of workload or pressure.
    2. Behavioral Markers: Recognition by potential backup providers that there is a workload distribution problem in their team. Shifting of work responsibilities to underutilized team members. Completion of the whole task or parts of tasks by other team member.
  3. Adaptability
    1. Definition: Ability to adjust strategies based on information gathered from the environment through the use of backup behavior and reallocation of intrateam resources. Altering a course of action or team repertoire in response to changing conditions (internal or external).
    2. Behavioral Markers: Identify cues that a change has occurred, assign meaning to that change, and develop a new plan to deal with the changes. Identify opportunities for improvement and innovation for habitual or routine practices. Remain vigilant to changes in the internal and external environment of the team.

References   [ + ]

1. ↩ Let me know if you feel I have failed to attribute something appropriately. Tell me how to fix the error, and I will do so. I regret any mistakes in quoting from my sources.
2. ↩ Adapted from Group Behavior, accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at https://www.boundless.com/psychology/textbooks/boundless-psychology-textbook/social-psychology-20/social-influence-104/group-behavior-393-12928/
3. ↩ “Groups Perform Better Than the Best Individuals on Letters-to-Numbers Problems: Effects of Group Size”, Patrick Laughlin, Erin Hatch, Jonathan Silver, and Lee Boh, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 90, No. 4. Accessed online on Jun 27, 2015.
4. ↩ Takao Sasaki et al, Ant Colonies Outperform Individuals When A Sensory Discrimination Task is Difficult But Not When it is Easy.Proceedings of the National Science Academy of Sciences of the United States 2013 110(34). Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at http://www.pnas.org/content/110/34/13769.full.pdf+html
5. ↩ Tuckman, Bruce W. (1965) ‘Developmental sequence in small groups’, Psychological Bulletin, 63, 384-399.
6. ↩ Anita Elberse, Ferguson’s Formula. HBR October 2013 Issue accessed on Jun 27 at https://hbr.org/2013/10/fergusons-formula. Also, Anita Elberse and Thomas Dye, Sir Alex Ferguson: Managing Manchester United. Harvard Business School Case N9-513-051, Sep 2012.
7. ↩ Eric M. Anicich et al, Hierarchical Cultural Values Predict Success and Mortality in High-Stakes Teams. Proceedings of the National Science Academy of Sciences of the United States 2015 112(5). Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at http://media.outsideonline.com/documents/himalaya-expedition-study.pdf.
8. ↩ Devon O’Neil, Summit or Death! Accessed on Jun 27 at http://www.outsideonline.com/1928751/summit-or-death
9. ↩ On such teams young players must commit to trying to become one of the best, and the example must be set by the more experienced members of the team.
10. ↩ Adapted from Garr Reynold’s Shokunin Kishitsu & The Five Elements of True Mastery. Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2015/05/the-five-secrets-to-mastery.html
11. ↩ Anita Wooley and Thomas W. Malone, What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women. Harvard Business Review, Jun 2011. Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at https://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/ar/1
12. ↩ Wolfgang Jenewein et al, Learning Collaboration from Tiki-Taka Soccer. Harvard Business Review, Jul 2014. Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at https://hbr.org/2014/07/learning-collaboration-from-tika-taka-soccer/
13. ↩ Andres Hatum and Luciana Silvestri, What Makes FC Barcelona Such a Successful Business? Harvard Business Review, Jun 16 2015. Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at https://hbr.org/2015/06/what-makes-fc-barcelona-such-a-successful-business
14. ↩ Julia A. Minson and Jennifer S. Mueller, The Cost of Collaboration: Why Joint Decision Making Exacerbates Rejection of Outside Information. Psychological Science, Mar 16, 2012. Accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/DPlab/papers/publishedPapers/Minson_2011_The%20cost%20of%20collaboration.pdf
15. ↩ Beng-Chong Lim and Katherine J. Klein, Team mental Models and Team Performance: A Field Study of The Effects of Team Mental Model Similarity and Accuracy.J. Organiz. Behav. 27, 403–418 (2006) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/job.387. Accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at http://www-management.wharton.upenn.edu/klein/documents/Lim_Klein_Team_mental_models_2006.pdf
16. ↩ Coincidentally, this is an area of investigation I often pursue when I study early stage startups – does the startup team’s mental model match the mental model that customers have of the startup? What are the implications if it does not?
17. ↩ Solomon E. Asch, Studies of Independence and Conformity: 1. A Minority of One Against A Unanimous Majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, Vol. 70, No. 9, Whole No. 416, 1956. Accessed online on Jun 28, 2015. I have saved a copy here Minority v. Majority – asch1956. A more accessible discussion of Samuel Asch’s research on Decision Making and Social Conformity can be found here
18. ↩ Adapted from Group Behavior, accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at https://www.boundless.com/psychology/textbooks/boundless-psychology-textbook/social-psychology-20/social-influence-104/group-behavior-393-12928/ 
19. ↩ Mueller, J. S. Why individuals in larger teams perform worse. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (2011), doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.08.004. Accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at https://1318d3f964915c298476-71207924aec76187d46cf4d3ee8ac05a.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/or-mueller_2012_obhdp_why-indivdiuals-in-larger-teams-perform-worse.pdf
20. ↩ Eduardo Salas, Dana E. Sims and C. Shawn Burke, Is There a “Big Five” in Teamwork?SMALL GROUP RESEARCH, Vol. 36 No. 5, October 2005 555-599 DOI: 10.1177/1046496405277134. Accessed on June 29, 2015 at http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/INF5181/h14/artikler-teamarbeid/salas_etal_2005_is_there_a_big_five_in_teamwork—copy.pdf. I have saved the relevant pages Salas et al – Big 5 in Team Work.