A Culture of Helpfulness

by | Jun 16, 2015 | Leadership Development

Today’s TED Talk made me think long and hard about the issue of culture in startups, especially about how to create a culture of helpfulness. The research on the subject is quite clear, that helpful cultures outperform unhelpful ones hands down.

I’m struggling though with whether a culture of helpfulness is at odds with a results oriented culture. Is it possible to have both? If helpfulness leads to better results, should you focus on the end goal or on the process to get there?

I’m disturbed that I may have been mistaken my whole life, trying to create results oriented cultures when I know I would much rather work in a culture of helpfulness without the competition.

I left an organization a number of years because I just didn’t enjoy working there. I had ended up in a job I didn’t like and that was a good enough reason but fundamentally I didn’t like the organization.

Since then, I’ve struggled to define what it was exactly that I didn’t like. Over the years I have identified a number of factors that influenced my decision but until I watched this TED Talk, I didn’t see the whole reason. And that reason was that there was not a culture of helpfulness.

There may have been helpfulness within various teams in the organization but fundamentally there was no helpfulness between teams. Each team had its own budget and there was intense competition for and jealousy of other teams budgets. Results were team based and not organization based and there was intense competition to see who could be the shining star, individually or as a team.

This resulted in a general lack of helpfulness between teams, in fact it was so bad that teams would encroach upon each other, stealing good ideas and replicating programs. There was poor handoff of clients between teams and even a competition between teams for clients.

The problem was, that as bad as it was, the organization was not open to change. And his made it extremely frustrating when you needed to get things done in conjunction with another team. While the problems were easy to see and the consequences quite predictable, the organization was not open to analytical self criticism. Eschewing self-critical analysis, it buried conflict because candor was not safe.

Anyway, enough of my lamenting. Watch the video and think about your own organization. And if you need to either create or go find a culture of helpfulness.

 

Why Startups Succeed

by | Jun 2, 2015 | Entrepreneurship

There is a great TED Talk you should watch that went live yesterday. In the talk Bill Gross who is the founder of IdeaLab and has founded a lot of startups talks about some research he has done about why startups succeed and others fail.

“He has gathered data from hundreds of companies, his own and other people’s, and ranked each company on five key factors. He found one factor that stands out from the others — and surprised even him.”

And that factor is timing. It is his proposition that the one thing that contributed most to a business’s success was timing. The startups that came out at the right time succeeded and the ones that were early or late didn’t do as well.

Two other factors that he felt contributed to why startups succeed were the characteristics of the founding team and the degree of differentiation of the idea.

Unfortunately, as a recipe for success, that leaves a little bit lacking. You really should ask the question, then: “How do I get my timing right and how do I know this is a good time for my business?”

I think I have an answer for the question of timing. While I haven’t done the quality of the research that Bill has, I’ve been doing similar research for 15 years, trying to figure out why startups succeed. But more on that tomorrow.

Watch the talk, it’s only about six minutes long, and return tomorrow for my take on how you can get your timing right.