Martin Gonzalez is an Organizational Development Leader and the coauthor of the book The Bonfire Moment: Bring Your Team Together to Solve the Hardest Problems Startups Face. With extensive experience working with early stage startup founders and teams within Google, Martin has seen first-hand the challenges and breakthrough moments of what it takes to build exceptional teams. During our conversation, Martin spoke about some of the misconceptions that we have of teams, and some of the approaches that he has used to help seed and scale teams ranging from startups to diverse types of teams inside of organizations. Martin also spoke about some of the common traps teams fall into, and his learnings from delivering The Bonfire Moment workshop with numerous teams.
The Edge of Work: You’ve worked on building great teams at large organizations (Google) and very small organizations (ex: startups) – What is similar and what is different?
There are certainly startups wherever you look. A startup is a team with an extremely motivated leader, big, ambitious goals, and tight constraints. I see this all the time in medium and large businesses. More than that, there is an extreme amount of similarity in the kinds of people and culture challenges they face. When optimizing for speed they get sloppy about important matters that have longer-term downsides (e.g., finding cofounders/hiring, addressing a toxic culture, building a foundation of trust). They create inner circles which resist the high quality disagreements required to build remarkable products and services. And they struggle between being overconfident and underconfident.
I think there are three notable ways that make the startup in a garage fairly distinct from the internal startup nested inside a Fortune 500 company. First: Ownership (the literal financial kind, vs just the mindset) creates an extreme amount of accountability, driving founders who don’t get their payout until an exit or some milestone fundraise to push really hard.
Second: Early-stage startup founders are also unencumbered by structure and process, but they’ll very quickly learn of its necessity as soon as they reach 50 employees and beyond. This means their early hires need to be ready to build a house, and not just move into one.
Third: When you’re unable to offer competitive salaries, those who choose to join a fledgling startup are akin to missionaries—they bring a passion to participate in an inspiring mission, even without the usual affordances of a big company job. And startups always struggle when they start raising cash to hire world-class talent, realizing that sense of mission dilutes as they grow.
The Edge of Work: Teams are not new, but from your experience, what do we get wrong, or what do we overlook when we think about building teams?
People in our field often look at strained interactions in a team and a bit too quickly conclude there are trust issues, then rush in to fix. Personality tests, happy hours, ice breakers, ropes courses are the types of hammers that think everything is a nail. Although those strategies may provide a temporary boost that lasts for a few weeks, they often fail to address the underlying issues that require deeper diagnosis.
Instead, we urge practitioners to ask the deeper questions. In our book, we created a diagnostic flowchart of questions to help leaders and practitioners work through what’s going on. As you move down the list, the dynamics become less obvious and it gets harder to elicit honest answers. But if they succeed in getting answers all the way down, they’re more effectively able to design solutions, with better results than these trust-building events.
We encourage practitioners to work this list from top to bottom when conducting a diagnosis, but then address issues from the bottom up after the diagnosis.
For instance, after working through the questions, you might find that the deepest source of conflict is a recent pivot that wasn’t clearly laid out. It’s best to address the fuzzy pivot first, then work back upward to deal with other problems, such as commitment gaps and strained interactions. By addressing a fuzzy pivot, you may find that many of the issues self-resolve. Dig deeply to figure out what’s really going on, then start at the deepest level to begin an intervention.
The Edge of Work: When building teams, what are the common traps that you see people fall into that they should think about avoiding?
We’ve seen 4 traps that startups systematically fall into if they’re not careful. Here’s an overview of them:
- The trap of speed. Startups need to win at both the short game and the long game. But they often get hyper-focused on the short game. People are instinctively biased towards urgent, burning issues (like launch deadlines and investor pitches) and take for granted important team issues that have longer-term payoffs (like partnering with the right cofounders, shaping the team culture deliberately, and resolving conflicts), despite research from places like Stanford that clearly show that the choices made early in defining the team’s culture predicts its chances of success or failure.
- The trap of the inner circle. Many teams find their cultures dominated by an inner circle that forms around the founders or other strongly opinionated, charismatic leaders within the organization. The positional or personal power of those in the inner circle often leads to groupthink and an inability to create positive disagreement and constructive conflict.
- The trap of the maverick mindset. Entrepreneurs chose to build a startup to disrupt norms and industries, but at times go too far in challenging certain management practices. They may force egalitarianism with equal equity splits while leaving expectations unclear; create fuzzy power-sharing arrangements; resist introducing hierarchy to avoid bureaucracy; over-rely on heroics; or strive to eliminate all conflicts, including the healthy or inevitable ones.
- The trap of confidence. While overconfidence is often necessary to get started, it often becomes a liability as the company scales. It can result in under-preparation and prediction errors. Underconfidence, often triggered by the startup brag culture and self-inflicted perfectionism, can lead founders to quit or engage in self-discounting behaviors that chip away at their potential success. Effective leaders need to travel a narrow strait between these two extremes.
The Edge of Work: You’ve used your workshop with dozens/hundreds of teams across the globe. What does it look like, and what are some of the learnings you’ve gained from doing this workshop with so many people?
The Bonfire Moment was indeed inspired by a workshop we first created 9 years ago within the Google for Startups Accelerator, and since then have scaled to reach startups in about 70 countries. It scaled quite significantly because despite it being a simple 1-day experience, it met a big gap for founders who realize soon after they start building the team, that the people stuff is much harder to crack than many other facets of the business. They realize what former Google executive and Sequoia Capital partner Bill Coughran would say: “Engineering is easy; people are hard.”
Through the book, we open source the workshop for all other teams to benefit from, including all the tools and frameworks that we’ve road tested.
The Bonfire Moment is an intense one-day experience for teams, where they confront some hard truths about their team dynamic and the business they’re in, they get real about their motivations for being here, what are likely failure scenarios, and how their insecurities and self-doubt can sometimes contribute to strained interactions in the team. We built it to be self-facilitated, and drew inspiration from the idea of a design sprint. In fact, when we pitched the book to our publisher, we told them The Bonfire Moment is the marriage between the books Sprint (by Jake Napp) and Radical Candor (by Kim Scott). Funny enough, after we wrote the book, both authors enjoyed it so much that they’ve provided their reviews which you’ll find at the back of the book.
The Edge of Work: What is the story behind the name, The Bonfire Moment?
We named the book (and the workshop) The Bonfire Moment first to acknowledge that the experience of building a startup can oftentimes feel like you’re in the fire, when working towards near-impossible goals while under extreme constraints. It’s intense and very quickly burns out the faint of heart. The Bonfire Moment is a chance for the team to step out of the fire and examine it in cooler air. It’s a moment to get back in touch with the mission of the team, bandage up relational wounds, and prepare for the next push.
The Edge of Work: Where can people find more information about you and your work?
I’m active on LinkedIn – please connect with me there. www.bonfiremoment.com is also a great place to learn more about our book, get access to tools, and even get certified in The Bonfire Moment methodology.
Links
- Bonfire Moment Website: https://www.bonfiremoment.com/
- Martin Gonzalez LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinjosegonzalez/