Founder Team Alignment: How To Avoid Confusion And Develop Clarity

This week what I’ll be talking about is technology companies and those companies that have got a web based app, cloud based service like a SAS service or any sort of digital product that they’re trying to sell, that their trying to do that as their main product to their customers or they’re trying to use digital services within their existing business.

I’ve been talking to these customers for the last month during lockdown and during this time I’ve taken the opportunity to kind of refocus and retarget my business to some extent still serving existing customers, but really trying to do a bunch of customer listening around what this group of people need. 

The Challenge

And what I found is that one of the things that they really struggle with is this idea of alignment among the founders. And when you’re moving so fast how do you get everyone aligned so you can move at pace to serve your customers? 

This would benefit people who are in that type of business but it will also benefit you if you’re a leader of business and part of the leadership team. I’m going to talk you around how to solve it and what I recommend.

The first thing to go to recognise is who we are talking about. So most people who started business. It starts with the founder, and they’re pretty happy because they’ve got a business idea, they want to bring the market. And then what happened is they actually realise that they need more than themselves to make it happen, so they kind of might bring on a tech guy, a CTO, a product person, and you know there may well be enough person here that’s also part of the team that’s a specialist and they kind of come on this founder team 

So a team becomes a team now, what happens is that most teams especially now have to move at speed, and a team like this is having to cover many bases, so you know the owners trying to do admin and run the business as well as selling the business. And because they are moving at speed they’re required to do a bunch of stuff and at the same time they are trying to make these decisions. 

What’s happening is two people are kind of banding with one another and this can happen in any leadership team where you know two people have the same idea about a certain decision or critical decision they got to make. And then they have one idea and the other person has a different idea.

What Can Happen Over Time? 

Unless there’s a way to resolve these problems, what happens is that the relationships between these people start to break down, and the overall unit doesn’t lead the businesses effectively and can impact on you of this, of that is frustration.

You start to enjoy things less and over time the erosion of trust, but the other thing is that the business, it actually makes you work, operates slower you have more confusion, less clarity and over time you start to lose your focus on customers.

Because you become very internal and if this foundation isn’t set up right from the beginning with the bigger companies I work. You end up multiplying that problem out to the whole organisation. 

Bullet Train or Bushwalk

Here is the thing, the analogy is this, it’s like a bullet train or bushwalk. Let’s start with the bushwalk story first, it’s the funniest one. I remember my father, when I was younger we travelled around the world, because my dad was a teacher and he got posted over the UK we went all throughout Europe through the US and often when we travel we go to places off the beaten track.

My dad was a big fan of rather than going the most directory let’s take the sideways the backstreets. Let’s take the back streets, always faster, but that’s just like a bushwalk, you know like where you want to get to a certain destination, but there’s many tracks you can take on the way to get there.

And the analogy with teams is what can happen is when you don’t have direction and clarity in the team it’s easy to get distracted by all these sideways tracks. 

As opposed to like a bullet train, a bullet train knows where it’s starting, it knows where it’s returning and it knows the destination that it is going for and can get there fast.

Now, in the teams we are talking about when they’re all aligned they are more like a bullet train, but when they’re working against one another or forming coalitions or and not aligned like a bushwalk right, they take all these sideways, all the tracks everywhere and get really distracted in the minutiae.

Recommendation

So what do you do about this? Well, here’s what I recommend, from the start the founders, and they should keep this up, and they at least every year, annually, do a day where they talk about results and the vision of the year ahead. And they put that up on the wall.

Then every quarter I would have a focus or a thing. That could be sales, marketing, I won’t go specifically, it depends on your business. And those things and those plans as much as they feel like they lock you in, they back you in the team focus. They also give you something to communicate and help people be accountable for.

And obviously there’s the monthly, weekly plan that you can work as founders, etc., weekly scrums and those stuff, but I’m not going to go into that here, because that’s not the important thing. The important thing is this, which is when you’re moving fast, when you’re moving a pace and you’ve got so many things you’ve got to do to get your business somewhere, it’s really easy to forget that you all need to have the same plan.  

Building in these rhythms is critically important, but so is the second part of this which is that you then in this annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly cycle need to have customer feedback. That happens in your quarterly, monthly, weekly meetings, and you do a big review yearly so that in these little quarterly moments and monthly moments you can pivot in an aligned way. 

You’ve got a point at which you can stop and go…okay, there was the plan that we had 12 months ago, but we’ve heard this feedback, how are we going to pivot that plan, what are we going to do differently? But let’s make sure that everyone is aligned or at least all facets are aligned.

Summary

And so the question is, I want you to stop and think about the team you’re in, when you make decisions together, when you’re trying to work at speed, are you working for the same plan? And if you are, what happens when that plan needs to change because of this customer feedback? Are you all aligned around what needs to change?

It’s essential to have a rhythm. Strategy, planning, execution rhythm allows you to be from a bushwalk to be like a bullet train.

Leave me a comment or Get in Touch

I hope that this has been useful, and the things I’m doing for these tech companies is putting together a framework. I’m going to be validating that over the next 2 months, 3 months, a coaching framework to help them out.

Two things here. One is leave me a comment down below which part of this resonates and turns to your business and what part of it you can use. The second one is if you need any help with this send me a direct message or send me any feedback around this and the approach and on how it might work in your business and I can talk you through how to implement it.

Talk to you soon.