What does it take to maintain your team’s drive during the challenging growth phase of your startup? How can you celebrate progress while staying grounded in reality?
The startup journey entails creative internal marketing, strategic task prioritization, and meaningful celebration of milestones. Scott Belsky’s book The Messy Middle includes proven strategies that can help you build and sustain a resilient, focused team through your venture’s most demanding phases.
Read more to get Belsky’s advice on how to keep your team motivated, especially during your business’s middle years.
Keeping Your Team Motivated
It’s unlikely that your new startup venture will be a one-person operation, and the burden of pushing through the hard middle years shouldn’t fall on your shoulders alone. Instead, achieving your overall business goals will doubtless be a team effort. We’ll discuss how to keep your team motivated—helping them focus on the tasks most important to their success and avoid the distractions that will try to drag them down.
We often think of marketing as something directed at potential customers, but, during the growing phase of your business, you must constantly market your vision to your team. Belsky suggests using graphics, slogans, and regular communications to reinforce your company’s key goals and milestones. You can create internal “advertising” that highlights your team’s achievements while pointing them toward the next steps in their process. By consistently promoting your vision and making progress visible, you keep your business’s reason for existence at the top of your team members’ minds. If done well, this will maintain enthusiasm and give people a clear sense of how their work contributes to the bigger picture.
(Shortform note: Belsky presents team motivation in terms of advertising, but, in Empowered, Cagan and Jones recommend something different—that you lead like a coach. To coach your workers toward success, you have to inspire them as a team and as individuals, create personal development plans for each member, and maintain a constant dialogue as everyone moves forward. Instead of “selling” them on your business goals—as Belsky suggests—you should motivate them by posing challenges that encourage your team members to think creatively and stretch their abilities. According to Cagan and Jones, this increases buy-in and motivation more than simply aligning workers with your ideas—coaching makes business success personal.)
However you achieve motivation, your team needs it to stay focused on the most important tasks. Belsky points out that, when progress feels slow, teams often dwell on small, easy problems instead of more significant issues. For instance, your team might fix an app’s fonts and color schemes instead of addressing functionality problems. This behavior comes from our deep-seated desire for the gratification of finishing a task, but it also leads to neglecting big problems that impact a project’s success. Belsky suggests that you clearly identify which tasks are the most significant and require your team to spend four-fifths of their time on important goals before moving to the quick, easy problems. Though difficult tasks take longer to achieve, explain to your team that accomplishing these tasks will be ultimately more rewarding.
(Shortform note: The ratio Belsky describes—that your team should spend 80% of their time on high-priority goals—appears to be a spiritual descendant of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto’s rule that 80% of outputs stem from 20% of inputs. In The 80/20 Principle, Richard Koch explains how this ratio appears in many areas of life. For example, we derive 80% of our happiness from 20% of our life experiences, and 80% of our best relationships are with 20% of the people we know. Koch asserts that you can apply the 80/20 rule to clear out waste in your business and focus your energy on the projects that matter most. In Belsky’s middle years of startup growth, the 80/20 rule helps you eliminate the needless work that slowly accumulates over time.)
Motivation by Celebration
Belsky emphasizes that you and your team must accept discomfort as a necessary part of pursuing your goals. After all, many successful companies emerged from failed initial concepts, and your ability to pivot and start over, despite the psychological toll it takes, is crucial to success. To achieve this resilience, you need a deep commitment to your overall mission without becoming attached to one specific approach. Since this kind of resilience is so important, Belsky suggests that, when hiring your team, you should evaluate your candidates’ ability to deal with uncertainty, challenges, and self-doubt.
Resilience can be hard to cultivate because humans evolved to prioritize short-term gains. Leaders must recognize this and find ways to help their teams stay motivated during long-term projects. Belsky says it’s important to provide your team with regular doses of positive reinforcement. Otherwise, you and your team may feel like you’re spinning your wheels. Traditional measures of success, like customer growth or financial gains, are often absent in the middle years of a venture, and the lack of external validation can be demoralizing. Therefore, you’ll have to create motivation by celebrating small victories and milestones, even if only by throwing a pizza party when your team successfully adds a new feature to your product.
(Shortform note: If you can sell your team on your startup’s larger goals, then the reinforcement Belsky describes doesn’t have to be superficial. In Empowered, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones explain the motivational benefits of letting your team members take personal ownership of their objectives. This requires giving them some autonomy over how they achieve their goals, but when your team feels responsible for achieving your startup’s wider mission—when they start thinking like owners—they base their focus and sense of satisfaction on the outcome of their work, making them less dependent on individual rewards. However, this mindset demands transparency—workers need to know whether their efforts are actually helping the business.)
However, Belsky cautions against celebrating false victories or giving positive feedback at the expense of confronting hard truths. Focusing only on positive outcomes or overstating praise can lead you to ignore problems. Instead, strive for an objective view of your venture’s progress, considering both its positive and negative trends. Look at your business from multiple points of view, such as those of investors or potential customers, and you’ll be able to keep a realistic view of your progress and the challenges still ahead. Be honest with yourself and your team about your business’s difficulties—don’t hide bad news while you celebrate progress.
(Shortform note: Being honest about your progress may be harder than you think, and for different reasons than Belsky describes. You may assume that tracking the right metrics will reveal whether your products will be profitable or how to make them better, but in Competing Against Luck, Clayton Christensen argues that the numbers aren’t as objective as they seem. How you collect data often depends on subjective decisions, such as what questions you ask on customer surveys. Because the results look like hard numbers, they can give an illusion of objectivity that may not be as firm as it appears. Therefore, be aware of any factors that might skew your interpretation of the numbers before reporting success or failure to your team.)
Exercise
During points where it seemed your progress was slowing, what motivational tactics did you use to keep going? In retrospect, what else could you have done to keep your energy levels high?
