Techstars Day1 - Spare just 1 hour and you can build trust within members

Spare just 1 hour and you can build trust within members

I am currently in Boston attending an event hosted by techstars. My brother started a startup with a colleauge in UC Berkely last year, and I came to the States to help him build his products with my software engineering skills. His startup was chosen as one of the twelve startups selected by Techstars for the evennt. Twelve companies doing their business in the crypto world gathered in Boston to get mentored by Techstars.

On the first day of the Techstars event (2023-01-19), all attendants sat in a room to listen to a lecture on teamwork. I have never attended to any MBA classes, but one could say the whole lecture was quite similar to classes provided in MBA programs. We were taught about some theories and strategies to manage a team. But I believe this lecture had more vitality than a normal MBA class in that all participants were CEOs of their startups and thus were eager to get the most out of the lecture.

At first, the whole lecture seemed boring. As a student who had listened to business management classes back in Seoul National University, all the things that were taught by the lecturer seemed too obvious. The main topic was about functions of a team, what differentiates a good team and a bad team. However, as the lecture progressed, I felt there were some parts worth notetaking.

Develop deep relations when a newcomer joins

In the first part of the lecture, the lecturer asked each one of us to answer to three questions.

1. Where did you grow up?
2. How many siblings do you have? (Are you the youngest or the oldest?)
3. Did you have any unique challenges during your childhood. And if so, how did that challenge affect you in your life.

The first two questions are just simple questions, but the last one is something that requires some thought and some time to think of. Taking turns, people talked about their unique challenges. Some talked about how their unique challenges made eventually made them do a startup, some just talked about their difficult childhood, and some talked about their coutnry's poor situation. Each person took a significant amount of time talking of their own stories.

It took approximately one hour for all the 30 people to share all their stories. After everyone spoke, the lecturer asked us if we felt more acquainted with one another. And it sure did. He was lecturing the importance of opening up your vulnerability to your team members, and he told us that by going through this process, team workers can get to know each other better and be reliable to each other. It just took 1 hour for 30 people to answer the questions. How long will it take for a team of 10 people to go through this process? Just sparing only a few minutes will be enough to make everyone feel deeply connected to each other.

This was the part I realized the importance of having an off-site occasion whenever a newcomer joins a group. No matter what kind of work the team members are doing, if the team has decided to embrace a new team member, everyone should take a leave for their work at least for 1 hour to openly talk with the newcomer and open themselves up to vulnerability. No excuses whatsoever. The newcomer is a priceless and thankful person to have decided to join the risky startup journey together with the team, and thus, the team should pay their utmost respect to the newcomer. Remove all the walls you may have in normal situations and open yourself to the newcomer. The best way to form the atmostphere of being connected is to ask each participant about their childhood difficulties.

Boring team meetings is a meeting where there are no conflicts

Next, we were lectured about conflicts. Some of the lecture notes were obvios, but what struck me was the sentence, "Boring team meetings is a meeting where there are no conflicts." The lecturer also added that if a team meeting ended without having any conflicts is a bad sign. The fact that there are some conflicts regarding their project (personal conflicts are disregarded here).

I personally reflected on myself a lot on this subject. When I am in a situation of managing a team, I tend to be some sort of a manager-who-knows-all (As a type of person who plans everything, I plan everything before doing some project). When somebody objects to what I have planned for a project, it is quite difficult for me to discuss that matter in a leisurely manner. To other team members, I believe I might seem as though I am a stubborn boss when having a conflict where I am in charge of the project.

The lecturer commented about the importance of creating an environment where an employee can speak up and raise objections. If your attitude makes the team have a hard time raising a healthy conflict in the first place, it is important to contain yourself for the team. The lecturer talked about one CEO who practiced to contain himself whenever an employee raises an objection. The reason he practices it is because he knows well that once he takes immediate respondence to that opposite opinion, the person who raised an objection will fall down immediately and seldomly raise any objections in the future. The lecturer commented that to remedy the situtation, the CEO came up with an idea to always put a person who would always replies with a 'thank you for voicing your opinion' to the person who raised the objection in a meeting. When I happen to be leading a team, I believe I should also think of my own ways to make myself and the team openly object to any ideas they think are wrong or could be done better.

Delving in to the topic about reacting to conflicts, the lecturer said that how you react to conflicts are predominantly learned from your caregivers. No matter what environment you were reared from, how you deal with conflicts does not change much from how you were learned to deal with conflicts from your caregivers. How you react to conflicts with other people has to do with how your parents fight each other and later patch up.

This also made me reflect upon myself again. Mostly my mother would be quiet when there is a fight between her and father. Similar to her, when I am being the one being scolded especially in personal conflicts, I tend to stay quiet. I cannot come up with any sentences to respond to that scold unless it is something utterly nonsense. When emotions rush, my sentence get loose. When some work does not seem to go well, I feel somewhat irritated and add emotion to my words. I believe this is somewhat similar to how my mother expresses anger in some occasions. She sometimes express her discomfort in my father's actions with emotion full of irritation.

Beware Triangulation.

The last memorable topic that the lecturer taught about was 'Triangulation'. 'Triangulation' is a term the lecturer himself coined up. To briefly explain what it is, it is a situation where B tells C the problems he/she has with A instead of having direct conversations with A. The lecturer said that this is one of the signal that a team is not operating well. It seems very obvious, but coming to think of it, it happens rather often in many cases in life, even mine also. The main reason why Triangulation is harmful to a startup especially is because it means that team members are avoiding conflicts. They are just being bystanders to a dying company. This can also lead to decreased commitment among team members since avoiding direct conflict with another person means that people are trying separate in groups. What can be worse than a small group of people in a startup dividing into groups?

These were the things I wanted to share for the first day of Techstars. It was a semi-MBA class but I believe it was worth it. I actually learned a lot and had some time to reflect on myself.