Startup 122: Speech – The Final Frontier

Posted by Joseph Ansanelli on May 4, 2009 in Recent, Startups, Teams | 3 comments

OK, I’ll admit it.  I am psyched to see the new Star Trek Movie.  Check out the new preview.  This is clearly not your Father’s Star Trek…

But what does Star Trek have to do with startups?  It turns out that Star Trek has successfully “predicted” quite a few modern day inventions.   The most famous being the Communicator and the Cell Phone.

Yet even with all this forward looking Star Trek technology, what we never saw on The Enterprise are the crackberry, text messaging, facebook updating, tweetering, iphone addicts we’ve become.  Look around and what do we do each day instead of talking?

Lots and lots of email.   Text messaging.  Maybe a few instant messages and skypes.  Throw in a few facebook updates.  And then of course some Tweets about, well, the most random of things.

While Twitter is certainly an interesting phenomenon, in many ways it is causing people to forget one of the most important ingredients for a successful startup (or any organization for that matter).

That ingredient is simply speaking to one another.

Yes, the final frontier is taking people back to the future of sitting down face to face, one on one, or as a team, or worst case using the phone to actually speak versus texting, emailing or twittering the days away.

Why is this important?
One of the best ways to have an engaged and productive team is for them to understand and be part of a team’s success.  Engagement happens when you speak to the team, answer questions on why something is important versus other ideas, discuss what’s working and what’s not and what the team needs to do to succeed long term.  Engagement does not happen with a quarterly email or 140 character update.  Those are important elements of communications, but nothing can replace the importance of having an open forum and interactive discussion with your team about what are the team’s wildly important goals, its strategies for how to achieve them and discussion about how well the team is achieving against a set of measurable objectives. (See previous post on goal setting)

What to Share
In general, it’s important to share everything -- the good, the bad and the ugly (Ok, I promise last movie reference…).  There are really only a few things I would never discuss openly with the team.  They are things such as performance reviews, any health or other private matters, or compensation information.  Additionally, there are certain things that are simply illegal to cover such as an acquisition by a public company or other financial information that could be used for insider trading.  Other than those two big buckets, there are not many “off limit” topics.

As part of that, one of the things I encourage people to do is regularly share a startups financial results.  It is incredibly empowering to a team to see the cash flow chart and the date it hits $0.  While it may make the team nervous, maybe not knowing will make them even more nervous?  And maybe knowing will actually have the team work either smarter or harder to change the trajectory?  And if you also share the top line results, everyone gets engaged in the competitive thrill of making the company a success.

I am often surprised at how few leaders regularly share this information so please don’t be afraid to share more than less.  The flipside is that if you don’t share, the team will likely assume things and they usually assume the worst.

Playing the drums
Larry, a great friend and incredibly talented business executive, always talks about setting a rhythm for the business.  He taught me to set expectations and have a regular pattern in the company for things such as business reviews.  I extended this idea to communications as well.

For Vontu, my rhythm for communications was each week started off with a team meeting of my direct reports during which we reviewed key updates starting with the team, and then sales, development, et al.  This was a small meeting of ~10 people during which we could openly discuss the successes and more importantly the challenges we were facing in the business.

Also, each week I worked hard, especially as we got more and more busy, to have one on one meetings with each of the senior executives on the team.  This is probably one of the most difficult things to maintain, as we were all busy and traveling hundreds of thousands of miles each year.  If I could not meet in person due to travel, then this often times became a phone call.

Lastly, each week we had a one-hour all hands meeting for the entire company.  People in the field would call in and everyone in the office would meet in a big conference room.  This was an opportunity to introduce new people that joined the company, share any other people news, to review our wildly important goals such as sales, customer success and then often to discuss a special topic on an aspect of the business.  The meetings were very interactive with lots of questions and discussions.   Informally, I would also spend time each week simply walking the halls and talking with people.

The other big communications opportunities typically happened on a quarterly basis.  Each quarter, we flew the whole company to San Francisco for training.  As part of that we had everyone together for an all hands meeting in which I presented how well we had done in the quarter, what the top challenges for the company were, and tried to generally get the team engaged about our future.  This ended up being a 2 hour session with lots of Q&A which often including the rest of the executive team.  This was one of the best opportunities to make sure everyone knew what were the 3-5 wildly important goals and how well we were doing.

Like a great drummer which keeps the beat, a good leader keeps the rhythm of the company by setting a tempo of regular communications.

When in Doubt
Now, I am not suggesting all communications is about sitting in a room singing Kumbaya.  As a matter of fact, one of the most important times for face to communications is in dealing with difficult situations and conflict. Let’s face it, it’s uncomfortable to tell someone you are frustrated, disappointed, unhappy, or even downright angry.  And so today, it is amazing how often people revert to either doing nothing or sending the dreaded “flamagram”.  It is much easier to tell someone bad news or deal with conflict over email because you don’t have to look them in the eye and deal with their reaction.  Yet, as a leader, you should avoid this at all costs.  And if you see others engaged in using email to deal with conflict that typically only causes more conflict, encourage people to move to a face to face communications.

What about the rest of my job?
Now if you add up all this time, communications takes up 25-40% of your work week.  Does this seems like a lot?   It is, but at the end of the day, if you are leading a team, your job is just that, to lead.  And to lead you need followers.  The best way to get followers?  Tell them where you are going and ask them to join you in the journey.  And remember to not just email, text, IM, or twitter your updates.  Take the time talk.

And if you like this post, talk with your friends about it or tell them about it by twittering or using any other one of the links below. And feel free to leave a comment or two.

Lastly, with all that said, you can still sign up for my email list to get updates on future posts.  And yes, you can follow me on twitter too. 

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Drummer photo by Bill Gracey