Core Strength
A fit team tends to be able to ride the roller coaster leading to success without throwing up. Implementing a strong core as you form a business, paves the way for faster growth and greater success later on. The business matures, which is an important element of how you compete when bigger companies enter your markets. If you delay establishing a strong core in the early stages, the costs of doing so later, escalate disproportionately as you grow, as does the push-back the team tends to present. A strong core tends to improve all aspects of corporate health. As it does for elite athletes, the sooner you build a strong core, the better your health, performance and stamina will be over the long term. Unlike an individual race, businesses have many finish lines to cross, often without prior warning or foresight. Planning for success is a key attribute of attaining success, a theme critical to the InsideSpin philosophy. It's surprising how planning for success is often a forgotten concept. This section meanders through a variety of important core attributes every team should develop as early as possible in the growth of a business. You may need to make some sacrifices to develop certain core attributes, endure some pain and conflict from within your team to make the gain, but it will be worth it as you start to emerge in your market as a key competitor to recon with.
Communication
Communication (or lack thereof) is often reported by a team as the single biggest concern they have as a gating factor to achieving success. Poor communication is sited in most companies, regardless of their state of maturity, size or position in the market. In fact, no matter what a leadership team might do to improve communication, it still often remains at the top of the list of concerns for many employees.
Unfortunately, communication is not an easy subject to riddle out. Solutions are typically specific to each individual or team or even one situation. Some want to be part of every email thread, some look for involvement in more meetings (really!), some look for increased team-wide communication, consistent communication, open communication, one on one encounters, written materials, some even want to see less time communicating in that time is better spent getting things done than talking about doing them. Perspectives on communication tend to be very individual in nature and as such, the solution is often rooted in a variety of approaches, all need to be done to be effective. People absorb information in different ways, so when you look across a diverse team you need to think about effective communication in a diverse way.
A simple rule of thumb might be to pick three main forms of communication and consistently implement them in your company. Make sure all are used for most all information that should be communicated. Your challenge is to fight the boredom that often occurs over time, even in creating the communication itself. It seems to typically take about 6 months for boredom to set in, bringing on a period where effective communication goes either unnoticed or stops happening at all.
Business Planning
Business planning is a formality that takes extreme effort to implement. Effective leaders demand formalized and well structured business documents (proposals) as a framework for making key decisions. Poor leaders play lip service to formalizing business decisions, relying on some innate ability to make them without feeling the need to discuss, write down, plan and review. Sometimes that works, especially when starting a business, but should not be depended on as the method of standard, as the business grows.
Decisions made from top-of-mind emails or from conversations with whomever happens to be around, often lead to confusion downstream, or at least a feeling of un-focus. Lack of business formality erodes the strength of even the best teams; the area of weakest business formality in most companies is often the way in which product enhancements are planned.
Furthermore, as a team grows, the new players brought in for their experience, look for the formality of business planning, as they are often expecting a certain level of business maturity from their prior companies. They express happiness smaller companies have less bureaucracy (often the reason for the job change), but get frustrated with the looseness by which some decisions are made -- in effect, eroding their sense of authority and reason for being at your company. As stated above, implementing a strong core as early as you can, benefits the business long term.