Get people to play their position

"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet” Damon Runyon

When my kids were young like all good yuppie parents we got them involved in organized sports. This of course meant soccer. Watching 6 year olds play soccer was best described as a “dance of the bumble bees” since all players from both teams swarm after the ball with varying degrees of vigor. Sometimes the ball inexplicably even goes in the net. Watching this event is amusing – for about 10 minutes. After that watching the parents and coaches is much more fun since they are much more serious about THE GAME than the kids, who would be having a great time if the coaches and parents weren’t screaming instructions at them.

Startup companies tend to be very much like soccer matches involving 6 year olds. There is so much new stuff always going on that everyone wants to be involved – with everything – all the time. Thus business tends to be a group of people all trying to do the same thing, together, all the time.

The successful startup executive must get people to play their position, because the ball is going to come their way at some point and they’ll be out of position and miss an opportunity. And where missed opportunities are important to big companies and critical to small and medium sized companies they can be deadly to startups.

Assuming you’ve hired normally intelligent and well-rounded people (and if you haven’t you have way bigger problems) you do this by COMMUNICATION. It works like this; you have a conversation with each of your key people to make sure they understand:

• their role
• how their role fits into the success of the company
• how their role fits with other roles
• why “playing their position” is critical for success
• what needs to happen before the “ball” comes their way
• what they need to be prepared to do with the ball

The total time for this conversation is about 30 minutes each. Then, a couple of times a month you refresh the conversation. That’s it, an hour per key player per month. And what you get are involved and informed partners in your start up who are on the program and ready to participate.

The total number of start up executives who actually do this?