Building a Fireproof Team

Building a robust and resilient team requires constant intention every step of the way so that when the going gets tough, or a crisis erupts, the fireproof team can respond. Investing to build a strong startup team that can field a startup’s inevitable curveballs is essential.

By their very nature, startup teams begin small and underresourced. Everything is built from scratch. The team finds its way through the confusion and ambiguity of forming something out of nothing. Staying very focused on the most urgent and important things is essential to making rapid, value-adding progress and whatever is not essential usually falls through the cracks. Sometimes the investment in the practices that make a team fireproof are considered non-essential by inexperienced leaders. Yet it is crucial to invest the time and effort in building a fireproof team that has the resilience to respond because someday, it will be critical. Startups are just too volatile for there to be endless smooth sailing.

What is a fireproof team?

Combustible teams collapse under pressure or when a key team member becomes unavailable. They point fingers, assign blame, and implode when the unexpected happens. They rely on singular “towers of knowledge” who hoard information and create massive risk for the company. They are often profoundly dependent on one or more of their founders and cannot survive the loss of that person(s). They routinely fail to execute, fail to communicate, fail to coordinate, fail to delegate effectively, and any number of other things that result in a team that cannot execute very well.

Fireproof teams have a culture where team members back each other up and stay focused on the relevant north star goals that align with the startup’s stage. Fireproof teams rally and swarm the problem when an unexpected crisis emerges. Fireproof teams are full of people who have the context, resources, and skills they need to step into the gap. Fireproof teams keep the balls rolling forward despite emergent obstacles or the loss of a key team member. Fireproof teams support, adapt, respond, and execute.

Building fireproof into the core of a startup is an intentional act – and a worthwhile one

Recently, my startup got thrown a big curveball. And as I observed all of us responding to it, I reflected on all the little choices I have made along the way to create a resilient, responsive team. It is a pattern that is deeply embedded in my management style. While I recognize that different CEOs have different management styles and different styles can be effective, the following are some of the key startup management choices I seek to instill in every team that I build to ensure we have the team-based strength and resilience to react to the unexpected trees that fall across the road sometimes.

When building a team, even from the very beginning, I am always thinking about and looking to establish backups and build up shared context around the critical building blocks of the business. Here are some tips on fireproofing your team:

• Create a culture of everyone helping everyone. Do not permit hoarding of important information. Model and enforce a kneejerk response of ‘How can I help?’ culture when a problem arises. Even if the decision ends up being that a certain subset of the team will tackle that particular problem, you want the response to be genuine and generous because that sense of ownership and care for one another matters a great deal when things suddenly get tough. It is much easier to dive in and try to solve the problem when you are not the only one jumping into the pool.
  
  
• Define clear ownership for different responsibilities while encouraging team-based collaborative problem-solving. Collaborative problem-solving builds relationships and keeps multiple people in the know. If you pay attention to strengths and weaknesses, you can use team-based problem-solving to leverage strengths, backfill weaknesses, and enable growth. Empower your leaders to make decisions and judgments in their scope of responsibility. Encourage leaders to pool their insight to tackle bigger and bigger problems with confidence and authority as you seek to guide and coach them to more refined success. If your leaders cannot grow into these judgment-based roles, you will have to consider upgrading your team to make sure you have the depth you need to scale your business.
  

• Avoid establishing ‘towers of knowledge’ where someone becomes so uniquely and exclusively expert in something that they are ‘irreplaceable,’ and no one else can do their job. This is truly dangerous for any company, especially a startup. If you allow it to happen, you are one car accident, health crisis, or decision to pursue another opportunity away from a potentially existential crisis. Force yourself and your team to be collaborative in their work so that someone else is at least exposed to the important information and could make a beginning of a response if needed.
  
  
• Make sure you are constantly building up a shared context for strategies and tactics. Be transparent and inclusive in your thought process about what you are doing and why. Equip your team with the contextual information to make good decisions on behalf of the company. Keep pushing that information out so that your team members are constantly absorbing a broader perspective. There is a balance here because everyone cannot know everything. However, you can create sub-teams that share information and back each other up. It becomes a layered set of overlapping circles and requires constant attention to ensure that information is being openly shared.
  

• Take advantage of naturally-occurring opportunities to grow and learn together. When a relatively minor problem arises, engage the team so that they have the practice of how to tackle it. Gradually, over time you can build up the team’s ability to respond to bigger and bigger problems. Stress test with variations and different problems. Eventually, the team’s growing confidence in each other and its ability to resiliently respond becomes a powerful reinforcing function that is available when some really tough problem shows up.
  

• Proactively think about backup and contingency plans. For each major building block of your startup, define who is primarily responsible for it and if that person is not available, who is the backup? Try to make sure you are continually investing in making sure the backup is reasonably up to speed. You never know when someone might get “hit by a bus,” so it is an excellent mental exercise to figure out, for each person, what would you do if the unthinkable happened? If you do not have a good answer, start working towards one, even if it is imperfect. I try to do this mental exercise every few months so I can be intentional and course-correct, as needed.