Building Teams and Startups Driven By a Single Strategy

Written by Vitor Oliveira, Co-founder & CEO at Napice

In 2012, I joined the 21212 Digital Accelerator in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and since then, I have been working with startups for about 10 years. During this period, I have realized and learned that one of the biggest challenges that leaders in early stage startups face is the ability to execute a single strategy and have the ability to be accountable for the lessons learned, failures and successes.

In my opinion, the ability to execute a single strategy is more important than the quality of the strategy itself. Implementing a strategy is the most important factor in evaluating a project for a startup and a team and that’s what I believe most leaders struggle with.

Why startups and teams face challenges in implementing a well-formulated strategy since we see so many failures due to lack of focus?

Well, one of the problems is that strategies — the only way startups and teams create value — are always changing, but the tools for measuring these strategies are staying behind.

The second problem is the quality of the people who are involved in the project. It is not enough to have an excellent idea, to make a strategy viable, we gotta have the right people with the right experience in the subject, know-how, energy and ability to prove the assumptions. Then, building teams becomes a discipline that any leader must master to be able to achieve success.

The third problem is precisely the routine and the way in which the feedback loops occur at the end of the weeks, quarters and years. Each one of us is in our own life journey, and the only way to learn is by doing and readjusting along the way. If we’re not humble to reflect on our lessons learned, how can we learn and evolve?

The fourth problem is doing several things at the same time when your team is still small and you have limited resources. Our energy and capabilities are limited so we need to identify the biggest problem and prioritize our energy on the right things.

My understanding about creating startups and teams oriented with a single strategy is that we have to translate strategies into operational aspects. Through the translation of a single strategy, we are able to set a direction in a coherent way. It’s hard to execute a certain strategy if we can’t communicate and describe it to ourselves and the people who are with us in the early stages of a project.

Besides that, alignment of the strategy is necessary because teams require that all team members understand the strategy and conduct their day-to-day tasks in order to contribute to the success of the strategy. We have to consider bottom-up communication and that’s the most difficult part for leadership teams of small companies, because leadership usually only opts for the top-down communication.

Converting the Strategy into a Continuous Process is also essential, because the process of learning and adapting the strategy must exist through meetings where all team members have the right to speak. In this way, it is possible to explain the cause and effect relationships in the business hypotheses.

As a final point, I’d argue that mobilizing change through servant leadership becomes important as we follow leaders who are present and act in a way that everyone around can see. These actions can generate authenticity if they are done in repeated and consistent way. One of the things that we teach at Napice is how to show up and lead engineering teams by example. This is an interesting point as one of the biggest challenges of remote work is in the day-to-day example.

How is it possible to be a servant leader in a remote world when we need to show authenticity and being observable on a daily basis? How do we show up so that people can see our actions, understand what is usual and replicate our example remotely?