A few years ago, I went for dinner with a bunch of colleagues to celebrate the birthday of one of us, let’s call them X. It was a fine place. We had not made a reservation so we did not know if we would get a seat. “Quick, everyone, pretend we are X’s entourage. We anyway look it,” the senior-colleague joked.
It was nothing. But I remember feeling smaller when this happened. Like that’s how my career would be treated by that space – as the entourage.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone cannot be the star. Everyone does not want to.
But I wanted the limelight. I wanted my voice to be out there. I wanted to be acknowledged more than just ‘entourage’. It was that lack of recognition in that moment which made me feel like my individuality did not matter.
I had the same feeling a few other times. Like the narrative being written for me within the company’s culture was VERY different than the narrative I wanted to write for myself – they keywords I would be introduced with not quite aligning with the ones I wanted to work towards. And when it became clear that that was not going to change, I quit the business.
But I also don’t think I was very articulate about this feeling at the time, or had done anything to command that spot. In this piece, I want to think about approaching your careers as not just something you work towards, but how that changes the tables you sit at, the kinds of companies you might want to work at, and of course, how these answers would feed into your communication strategy.
what do new companies look like?
corporate pop culture for the last few years has been all about the startup/business-building narrative. the hustle and grind of early startup days, the joy of scaling, the heartbreak of failing, those long hours of ideation, conceptualisation, the race to release the product, the rush to find the paying customers, the PPT after PPT struggle to get the VC money.
Among all this, through time, one thing remains unchanged: the need and struggle to build the right team.
It’s not just about finding the right people who believe in your vision, who want to solve the problem you want to solve. There is a constant pressure – find the best talent, not always have the top dollar to pay them. Keep them motivated and excited through the many ups and downs, and more importantly, the uncertainty of the early days and years of the startup.
And because it involves the very ‘easy’ matter of humans (who we all know are so straightforward and unchanging and devoid of egos and moods), there is no template to get this right. So thinkers and writers, venture capitalists, and successful startup founders have come up with several analogies, coined many phrases, to capture HOW they can navigate the trickiest issue of them all – that of people.
Are you preparing for a tournament or a war?
The dream team has been describe in many ways. As an army preparing for a war, as a family, as a pack of wolves, an agile generalist squad that can easily jump teams. Each analogy has been discussed and dissected enough, and I don’t want to spend time on this piece on these theories. As it is I think these are all in many ways inadequate – not instinctive to human nature.
An army requires a common enemy, someone to “defeat”. A pack of wolves are DESIGNED to travel that way, non-blood-related humans, perhaps not (unless there’s a crisis and a need). A generalist squad requires extra-high agency but lacks the sense of friendship and brother/sisterhood which makes people stick to each other and feel belonged.
The analogy I do love is that of a sports team.
A few people who are come together to achieve a goal, and celebrate the triumph of achieving that goal together. They go through the training, the grind, the planning, the strategising, and the execution together. Players spend hours and hours in practice, training, nutrition, endurance-building towards a particular goal, battling odds and uncertainties.
There is teamwork, there is the sense that everyone has to contribute to make the final result count, there is celebration. Everyone shares this glory.
A team win helps individuals in their personal lives also – they get brand deals, ability to demand more money.
A team can also absorb your bad days as an individual, and we carry each other.
When one batsman does not perform well, the others can try and hold fort. A bad bowling over can be compensated by great fielding. A bowler can come in in the last over, hit a 6, and win a match even though it’s not his department. They take their share of the credit, but the victory is the teams.
Not everyone can be a player though. Some are on the bench. Some are coaches. A handful of star players, and the rest working in service of that.
But do organisations have that many star positions available in a social-first marketing moment? Or will startups need to pick who are the stars of the team, and who are the builders?
Structures are built for the culture of the moment
I wrote this earlier this month, a theory about why personal branding is on the rise and has become the defining feature of our social media feeds. And every one wants a piece of the pie (I keep coming back these days to Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame prediction). More podcasts are being launched, more individuals are re-activating their LinkedIn, and people across age-groups are realising the power of being online and sharing their voice. It’s not about just the glory of being part of the winning team, it’s now about finding your place in the spotlight too.
As personal branding becomes more prominent, it may be teams become less like cricket or football, and more like say, Formula 1. An army of individuals who work together with dedication and precision, but that final podium belongs to only two people – the drivers. Every little brick is put in place so that one or both of your seat-holders can do their best on the track. And it is they who get to pop the champagne.
Everyone else is doing their part – the engineers are building the best car, the data analysts are helping with the most accurate simulations, the PR team is trying to paint the best story, about a 1000 people working under the banner of the team name. But the heroes en masse? Only the drivers. The talent.
What culture are you building?
These subtle distinctions are important. Because they inform so many things.
As a startup business, it allows you to hire the right talent, or at the very least, be attuned to the people’s aspirations. You can have as generalist a squad as possible, but if you are pushing one as the face of your company over others, you need to check in – do the others want to be on the podium too? If they do, and you do not have an honest conversation, you may lose someone who brings immense value otherwise. If they do not, but find that their efforts in the making of your star are going unrewarded, they are bound to leave. Sit with bitterness. Quietly fester it.
Pretending you are all winning in the same ways, when some are clearly winning more than others is perhaps the most misplaced thing to do.
Transparency is not the pretence of equality, it’s acknowledging and respecting everyone for what they do. Exactly for what they do.
Even startup founders have to build that clarity within themselves. It cannot begin to feel like people are working not towards a product or a service or a team victory, but towards one person’s success to the determent of their own.
Will everyone like that? I don’t know, I have never felt comfortable with one person being treated extra special than others, and positioned that way in public.
I’ve experienced this. At Purple Pencil Project, I’ve been supported by several amazing young folks who gave their precious year or two towards this space. Everyone who moved on remains a friend, all except one. And the reason we ended on bad terms? The inability to reasonably discuss how to split credit for a community IP we were building. It was a lengthy back and forth with no prior discussion and paperwork. Until then, I had not thought it necessary to discuss their aspirations.
It was a crucial lesson to learn.
*(Now that I think about it, startups are more like film-sets than any sports teams. About that, in another post).
How does this translate to your communication strategy?
As people-driven content becomes more prominent, who you put in front of the camera as the face of your company, how you choose them, and how are you positioning the rest of your folks is something you have to weave into your communication strategy – both internal and external.
I worked with a client once who wanted to put create a USP out of their talent – so we did a bunch of features on the talent. But when it came to simple things like collaborating on posts on social media accounts, they preferred to put their business heads and management at the forefront. The message and the positioning were clearly at logger-heads with each other – and they could not pick a lane about it. Me, and the analytics both did not like their confusion.
I did not start this piece with an answer. I don’t have a ready framework for it yet.
How do you position your employees when everyone wants to be a bit of a star, but only a few spots are there on the podium?
I have been having some ideas and thoughts:
- Can you build each one up as the best of their field? Can each of their personal brands be built in the space they want to own?
- How do you recognise the folks who do not want to be in the public eye, on social media, or play an active part in the social comms strategy? Perhaps you start by celebrating them, their contribution individually and loudly in the presence of the rest of the team. A reminder that they are valued, and they are not going to be sidelined.
- Perhaps the communication strategy must get people to talk about each other online?
- Maybe everyone be asked; how much of a public role do they want to take? And work backwards from there? I did that when Purple Pencil Project started to make videos. We have over 700 pieces on the website, and I want to convert them all to videos. The first thing I did was ask the team of reviewers how much of a role they wanted in this process. I did not want to get recognition for their effort and words. Only after they consented, giving me the right to be the spokesperson for their words, did I use them, starting with an essay on the Badaga language.
- Perhaps you keep the power within the hands of a few, and hire replaceable talent for everything else – someone who does the job but you don’t want in the long-run. You will risk high retention in many roles in that case.
- A townhall to talk about social strategy? A media-training centre to help folks build up their public credibility and do it well?
This process is incomplete, unless each professional also asks themselves – what is the nature of the glory I want?
I have friends who have thousands of followers and subscribers, and never want to face the camera or build a publicly famous profile. Journalists who are happy to be on the edit desk, and not chase bylines. Artists who are happy working for brands than building their public profile.
They are happy to be the power and skill in the shadows, making things happen. Moving needles from behind the spotlight. They are not insecure to support other people to become stars – guide them, mentor them, build the infrastructure for them to prosper. I know an equal number of people who want one thing and get lost in pursuing the other (I am also an example of that confusion), and then create chaos in what they are building.
So if you are building a sports team, ask yourself:
So are you the driver?
Are you the team owner?
Are you the team principal?
Are you a coach?
Are you a managing a player?
Are you the lead engineer?
Are you the backup driver testing simulation settings?
You cannot succeed in one role if you secretly want another.
The good thing is . You decide. You work towards it. And then you find the team that needs that role.