Building an Entrepreneurial Team
The most important principle for creating and developing an innovative team is to have a skillful team with different backgrounds; it is also vital to find self-motivated and initiative-taking people. Finally, the third attribute that I want is a collaborative attitude.
The teams are critical in entrepreneurial organizations and start-ups because the processes and the mechanism way forward are unclear. It is an iterative process that needs to be shaped up on the way based on the limitation and constraints that the team is facing. The team will be facing multiple challenges, and they need to be able to come up with solutions, way around for these challenges based on their experience, quick research, or their networks inputs. So the quality of the team is the most important contributor to the solution. It is like cooking on the go with the available material. It requires practicality as much as innovation. A divertive team with different backgrounds will provide an extensive network and know-how library to create relationships between other solutions and could feed into innovative solutions to the challenges that are going to be faced while implementing the products/services.
The entrepreneurial and start-up environment needs dedication, extra hours, and self-motivation. Since the challenges might cause some people to step back, the team members need to be self-motivated and ready to take action to address these challenges for sure with the coordination of the team and leadership.
Great minds are essential, but if they are not working in isolation, the entrepreneurial teams need to discuss, challenge each other and redefine the solutions they have identified and sometimes agree and sometimes disagree on the topics. In order to have the ability to have a productive environment, it is essential to bring collaborative people and a bit more extravert or, in other words, not hesitating to speak their mind.
Furthermore, there are some important factors to consider for innovative teams; the first is having a framework and set of rules. The innovation management process is vital for delivering the desired value, and specific steps must be followed. Then this process needs to understand by all the team members clearly so that it can be traceable. Secondly, deciding on the goals and objectives and handshaking with the team members for the direction are crucial initial stages, especially while moving into MVP and market entre. And the third factor is to bring external eyes, potential consumers, and experts to the game; since the team will be spending too much time together and hypostatizing around some solutions they might limit each other thinking, it is always beneficial to bring external triggers to test the ideas in every stage to ensure the best outcomes.
Through my readings, I also realized the importance of firing. It is pretty understandable that the people who are not sharing the same values or direction with the rest of the team or create negative stress on others need to be eliminated. Still, also it is important to understand the phases of the organization initiating the innovation, and scaling up the company requires a different skill set. Hence, it is crucial to ensure the necessary team shift along the way based on the maturity of the business.
The biggest challenge is attracting the right talents for start-ups since most of the talented people have already been employed or have some direction; it is the most challenging part to identify the talent and convince them to move from their current position to a start-up environment. The second challenge is the leaders’ mind shift challenge; the leaders that I have seen in the start-up community are not being able to grow and adopt a corporate culture and delegate the work to experts. They want to keep the control and innovative mindset although the organization matures. The scaling up time also needs to shift the leadership position and place them as board members and delegate the work to professionals to ensure its success. And to overcome the challenge related to hiring, the C-level team members need to use their network and capabilities to attack talent and think of out-of-the-box approaches to attract highly talented individuals.
Sources:
Innovation management: effective strategy and implementation -K Goffin, R Mitchell
Building and Growing entrepreneurial Teams — Arthur A Boni, John R Thorne
10 Tips for Successful Innovation Teams — Cari Fudge, Joaquin Roca