Facilitating Team Learning Curves

Leading a startup means forging new paths, building organizational infrastructure, and ultimately becoming skilled at facilitating team learning curves. This is one of the most challenging parts of being an entrepreneur trying to create a business.

A solo practitioner has all the advantages and disadvantages of doing everything themselves. An entrepreneur trying to build a substantial business must figure out how to scale that business by building the team and infrastructure to attract and consistently serve a critical mass of customers.

Often, this business-building process starts very small, with only the founder(s) doing everything. Over time and with initial success, there is a need to expand the team and establish repeatable processes to deliver the business’ products and services consistently. That means delegating responsibility for some of the work to others – and it means responsibly letting go of doing that work yourself and enabling your team to succeed in executing that work. Wouldn’t it be nice if that were easy?

Unfortunately, it rarely proves to be as easy as we wish. The reasons are natural results of human behavior and learning. Yet, if startup leaders fail to be cognizant of the process and self-aware of their roles, it can become an avoidable cause of startup failure and endless stress and frustration.

Building Organizational Infrastructure

In the abstract, a startup leader’s goal is to develop and operationalize the startup’s work at an increasing scale. This is inherently a people/process/technology challenge for every organization. For startups, it is often the founder(s) who start laying down the groundwork for this organizational growth process, and therein lies the challenge:

• Designing a process is different than executing it:  The person who designs a process knows why each step was included, the level of precision expected, the results to be communicated, and so forth. It is inherent to the process of designing a new process to think through all of those things. However, the people executing the process in the future will not have all of that background and often will not have the expertise of the person who designed the process. Therefore, they will need training and experience to get up to speed and succeed consistently.
  
  
• Documentation and digital tools can provide easily accessible support in executing a process effectively: Each organization will have to figure out what tools are most valuable for its team to track how to do its work. Various digital tools are available for workflow support, documentation of procedures, storage of data, and team communication. Which tools fit depends on many factors, some of which include any quality system requirements (think ISO, FDA QMS, etc.), team working locations, work environment limitations, frequency of execution of various processes, and team familiarity with various possibilities. I have seen various solutions work, ranging from a checklist for sending out periodic investor reports to controlled documentation outlining how to complete a software release to using Confluence-wikis to capture notes and guidelines to Trello or Jira for workflow or project management. Populating such tools takes an investment, but they can become a real support system for improving work quality.
  
  
• Building up an organization’s structured workflows will happen in stages: One mistake I have frequently seen is the desire to avoid “rework” by building a full-scale process in the early stage. A better approach is to approach the challenge incrementally, focusing on the most critical processes first. Often processes where you will be hiring multiple staff to execute consistency will be a good place to start. Alternatively, if there is a high compliance risk or a need for quality certification, that work will be a good place to begin documenting your processes. It will be better to establish a structured way to track periodic updates rather than try to build the ultimate solution upfront because one of a startup’s strengths is its ability to learn and evolve, so you want your infrastructure to support that strength rather than undermine it. You also do not want to overburden your processes early on.

 Help Your Company Grow By Letting Go

One of the significant challenges of leading a startup is progressively letting go of the work you used to do as you grow the organization. Leaders usually want to be able to delegate and offload work, but the actual process of doing it is often harder than one might think.

What makes it difficult is that startup founders usually begin in a place of doing “everything,” and as they grow their organization’s capabilities, they selectively peel off work by establishing processes and teams to take care of that work. Inevitably, handing off work to someone who has not done it before for your company is tough because they will not do it exactly the way you might – and there is the nagging everpresent thought that maybe I should step in and do it this time because I can use my experience to do it faster and better than the people who are learning will.

To enable growth, it becomes vital that the startup leader(s) be committed to establishing the conditions for success and facilitating their teams’ learning curves; otherwise, the leaders will become bottlenecks. Think about the following tips and lessons learned for navigating the process of building your organization’s muscles:

• Training is more than a “let’s review how to do this” exercise. One session showing someone how to do a task does not make the trainee proficient. Just because someone reads something once in a pile of other material does not mean they have absorbed all the nuances. Think of the process as a learning curve that involves multiple progressively more independent steps and requires support along the way to achieve proficiency with a new skill. A common approach is first to let a trainee observe a proficient teacher, then let the trainee do it together with the teacher, then the trainee tries while the teacher observes and corrects, and finally, the trainee does the work independently with opportunities to get corrections and feedback.
  
  
• Make sure that training includes the “why” behind decisions and actions. Understanding the purpose and rationale for different process parts helps team members understand when to deviate from the prescribed approach, recognize when to ask for help, and improve understanding and execution.
  
  
• Proficiency demands time and feedback. It is common for people who are learning something new to require multiple exposures (like seven or more) to develop their competency depending on the complexity of the task. The leader trying to establish a new organizational capability by creating processes and training team members must be patient with the learning process. Tolerating mistakes, providing constructive feedback, and clarifying documentation in response to confusion are essential to facilitating a positive and encouraging learning environment. Coming down on a mistake with a hammer blow will slow rather than speed up the learning process.
  
  
• A critical part of the process is when the trainee must make the leap and try independently. After some tries in a supported context, the trainer must step away and allow the trainee to try independently. It is incredibly tempting for someone trying to hand off a process to step in and correct on the fly to the point that the trainee never really gets a chance to do the work themselves. Also, sometimes, there is an expectation that learning has been accomplished even though the leader was still in the room providing implicit guardrails. Trainees almost always make mistakes the first time they do something on their own no matter how many practice runs they have had, so it is vital for the leader to discipline themselves to step away and let the team try, learn, and try again. Failing forces clarification and learning.
  
  
• Keep an eye out for missing tools and confusion points. Sometimes, it is not until someone else tries independently that it becomes apparent that they do not have the requisite logins or tool access or information to complete the work. We think we have everyone set up correctly, but until they try to do the work independently, errors in setup do not emerge.
  
  
• Be patient with dropped balls. The team will make mistakes. When a ball gets dropped, we must help them solve the problem and proceed positively rather than overreacting with excessive criticism. Getting nailed when making a mistake early on in the learning curve can destroy morale and culture, so it is essential that the leaders who are seeking to build organizational capability remain self-disciplined and positive until proficiency is achieved. At that point, the consequences for repeated mistakes can be appropriately raised.

As you can see, I emphasize the leader’s self-discipline in trying to build the organization’s capabilities because that is often when things break down. I have vivid memories of biting my tongue when observing something going a bit awry and telling myself to let the process play out lest I become the over-controlling blocker inhibiting my startup’s growth. Be intentional and patient as you seek to empower your team to do great things!