Creating a good team | Andy Billings

If you go back to my friends in the 2 racing game companies, there are kind of 3 things that I think differentiated them. These guys in a kind of a not too exciting urban location, they had a very strong sense of purpose and passion about what they were trying to accomplish. These guys knew knew they just wanted to make a lot of money and get a lot of status, but I wouldn't really call that necessarily a passion or a purpose. These folks weren't really aligned with exactly how they wanted to run their organization. They were a bunch of hotshots and all-stars, and they kind of came together to create an all-star team, and they squabbled and they argued a lot around who was going to do what and who was going to have what responsibilities and so forth, whereas the other team seemed to have a much more lower authority, More egalitarian form of decision-making. They had much more fluid roles. So this team ended up having a much better game because they started to differentiate in those. Let's kind of spend a couple minutes on those. So direction— there are 3 things I'm going to talk to you about that I think make for effective teams, and hopefully you can kind of go away with this as a framework. When you're in a team, you can kind of diagnose how well is my team doing by looking at its direction. Does it have a sense of purpose? have a passion. So I'm sure you've heard like millions of presentations around successful entrepreneurs all have a sense of purpose. But let me tell you, once you get an organization of about 12 or 15 people, you have people starting to join who don't necessarily have that clear sense of purpose and passion. And so now all of a sudden it's a lot of— it's a very important task for a leader and a team to be trying to convey that purpose and direction. That's direction. That's direction. So alignment, a lot of dimensions here on alignment, but alignment means do we agree on what we're each doing to contribute, what our roles are? Those certainly can change over time. And how do we make decisions in this group? Lots of teams struggle, including the team in the, you know, with the fancy BMW racing game. They struggled a lot around how they were going to make decisions, and there got to be power struggles. People would make a decision and then somehow it would get unwound. Alignment means, do we have a clear way of making decisions? That doesn't necessarily mean one way, but it certainly means kind of the Henry Ford Taylor model of one person makes all the decisions is not what you're going to see in an effective team today. Commitment. So everyone joins teams for some reasons that are similar and some reasons that are pretty different. And to the extent to which that team meets those needs, those motivations, that's going to help build the commitment and engagement. To the extent to which people share that sense of purpose and passion, that's going to help you as well. So I think now you've got just a really kind of a very simple but very super powerful 3 big ideas around what makes for successful teams. And I think what's in the middle of that is creativity. So when you have a clear sense of purpose and direction, you kind of know where you're trying to go. When you have commit— when you have that alignment, you have a pretty smooth-running team. And when you have that sense of commitment to the team, you have this sense of engagement, you're not worried about, am I gonna lose those members tomorrow, are they gonna show up, or do they really care about what we're trying to do? And that creates a climate in which innovation and creativity really comes out. And so since most of what you guys are going to work on is all going to rest on how creative your business plans are, how creative you are in forming your team, how creative you are in raising resources, or if you join other organizations, how much of a creative contribution can you make to those, I kind of want to concentrate on that for the rest of our conversation if that's okay with you guys. And in a VUCA world, you can just see how important is creativity, right? In a world constantly changing, our direction of what success is changing, circumstances are changing. So all of that's certainly evolving, which is just a perfect recipe for constantly being creative and coming up with unique and different ways to do things. If you do all of those, that's kind of my little pitch. That's the happiest looking team that I could come up with. So if you do all those— direction, alignment, commitment— I think you'd come up with that. And so that's what happens when you get into these teams. And I'm hoping all of you have had the experience of at least being in one team where there was a comfort with each other, you could share your ideas, you could bring an idea forward, people might kid you about it and laugh about it, but they still respected you and you were ready to bring up the next idea an hour later or 2 days later. And that there was— that that team really took advantage of the full power of all the contributions of the people on the team. So hopefully you had a sense of that. And you had this kind of very elusive sense of security. Some people call that safety. Some people want to call it psychological safety. So I'm just— I want to spend a few minutes and talk deeper about that.