Start-ups as Sport: what early stage ventures can learn from The Last Dance and Bruno Fernandes
Discussing the importance of cultural alignment and the impact of high performing catalysts
Over the holiday season I re-watched The Last Dance, the Netflix docuseries detailing the meteoric rise of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. It’s a riveting series about two key lessons; firstly, what it takes to develop a high performance culture and secondly, the importance of team dynamics. From the star quality brought by Michael Jordan, to the quirkiness of Dennis Rodman, and the various internal scuffles along the way between management and players, it’s an entertaining insight into what makes good teams great. These same principles and associated learnings can also be applied to early stage ventures.
The Venn Diagram of Start-up Culture
It goes without saying that different companies have different cultures, and it’s important to keep these cultures front of mind when creating your team. A disparity in personal vs workplace culture could bring up feelings of disenfranchisement, disillusionment and a misalignment of desires between the employees and the start-up’s goals.
PSA: free fruit and self-described “nice” colleagues is not culture.
Is your culture to keep the 5PM clock-off sacred? Do you prioritise a relaxed environment over results at all costs? Or perhaps you have a few VC rounds under your belt and are still loss-making, meaning the clock is ticking and you need high performers who will work later into the night to bring forward much-needed results. If you aren’t sure where your start-up falls on the Litmus test, evaluate what happens when target is missed (if there isn’t a target the bucket you fall into is fairly obvious). The answer to this question should give you a relatively clear indication as to whether you are currently a lifestyle business or a high performance business, through the behaviour of management and employees after missing a target.
The way I see it, there’s a Venn Diagram of general start-up culture. A “lifestyle” business sits in one circle and “high performance” sits in the other.
A lifestyle business prioritises the work-life balance and a relaxed environment whereas a high performance. business, prioritises continual growth towards key metrics as fast as possible at any cost. Sure, there are a few companies who will occupy the middle of the diagram, but these are certainly going to be exceptions, rather than the rule.
Source: Cacoo.com
Once you decide where you fall as a company, it makes it easier to establish what type of hire you are looking for, as a significant portion of the applicant pool will be more interested in one side of the diagram over the other. An applicant whose first priority is a relaxed, less goal-driven environment won’t fit in comfortably with the culture of a high-performance start-up looking to be the next unicorn and land a mammoth VC round in the next 18 months, for instance.
Michael Jordon touched on this in The Last Dance, stating firmly that anyone who joined his Bulls team had to perform at his level. If they didn’t like it, or couldn’t perform, they were welcome to leave the team. As viewers of the series know, Jordon’s “encouragement” of his team mates to perform better often involved openly bullying his team-mates during practice (which eventually led to a punch-up with Steve Kerr). This behaviour certainly wouldn’t be tolerated at a company that is focussed on team morale and a relaxed culture, but it was an imperative part of the high performance culture of the Bulls. As Jordan’s team-mates reminisce, years later, they agree that Jordon couldn’t have been classified as “a nice guy” and although they didn’t like the behaviour at the time they now appreciate the results that the behaviour brought out in them, and they have the championship rings to prove it!
So, to bring this back to tech start-ups, once you know what you’re looking to achieve (referencing the growth vs lifestyle entrepreneur classifications), then you will know what type of talent to attract. This will not only make the new hires feel more at home at your company, but will also keep the boat of team dynamics, steady.
The Importance of Team Dynamics
The smaller the team, the more important the team dynamics are. If 2 out of 8 people on your boat chooses not to row, when there are only 8 people in the boat, that’s a fairly large percentage. Now, compare that to 4 out of 100 people not rowing and it’s not as significant.
The same can be said with team dynamics. A few disenfranchised employees in a small start-up can make or break the next funding round or the next internal milestone. In order to manage this, you need to not only align the employee’s goals with the overall culture of the company, but also ensure there will be chemistry between new employees and existing employees. Again, in a larger scale-up this isn’t as much of an important consideration, but it is essential to early-stage ventures.
In order to succeed in business and in sport, as a high performer, you need to get in the trenches and hustle.
It’s therefore imperative that you are hustling alongside others who truly share the dream. For the Chicago Bulls, Scottie Pippen decided to throw in the towel and keep the bench warm when there was only a few seconds left on the clock - all because he wanted to be the star player and score the last basket, against what the coach advised. Pippen, sat on the bench sulking, let his teammates down and, by their own admission, they didn’t see him in quite the same light ever again. A high performing culture breeds this level of accountability, so that everyone is pulling together to the same goal, and dragging others along with them if they need to.
This is also the case in high performing start-ups. Each hire should have a clear directive on the parameters of their role, and how this helps push the team on to their targets. Typically, the earlier the venture, the less defined the roles, but there should still be KPIs and accountability built-in. This ensures that your high performer knows what they must do to succeed, and the rest of the team is also aware of this. This level of expectation and radical transparency is what Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates outlines in his bestselling book, Principles. It’s not hard to see how this mirrors the culture of the Bulls in the 90s.
Another aspect of team dynamics worth considering are the different personalities and roles in the team. Yes, you always want to hire 10/10 performers, as Stephen Schwarzman, Founder of Blackstone, outlines in What it Takes, but you can’t have 5 Michael Jordans on the court at the same time, as you need players like Dennis Rodman who will play an effective defensive role for the team. These players facilitate the Jordans of the world, providing them with a solid foundation on which to build. Case in point here is the 2004 US Men’s Olympic Basketball team. Whilst being as star-studded as a team can be (Allen Iverson, LeBron James, Tim Duncan, and Dwayne Wade, to name a few), in an Olympic event where the US always plays with a stacked deck, they lost three games to the likes of Lithuania, Puerto Rico and Argentina.
In similar fashion, if you have 10 non-product employees at your venture and all 10 are Enterprise sales people who don’t have the skill-set or appetite for customer service, on-boarding, or SME sales, you probably don’t have the correct team make-up. Similar to the Bulls, balance is key, allowing everyone to play to their strengths and ensuring everyone knows their respective roles.
The Catalyst
The Bulls went from being “a shitty team to one of the all-time best dynasties, all you needed was one match to start the fire.” - Michael Jordan
I’d be remiss to ship this newsletter without mentioning the above quote from Michael Jordan, from the 10th and final episode of The Last Dance. This highlights the impact that an individual can make in a team environment, raising everyone’s game and securing success in the process (in this case, a half dozen championship rings).
A good example here is Bruno Fernandes of Manchester United. When Bruno joined United in January 2020, they were in 5th place with 34 points, a massive 36 off of the Premier League leaders Liverpool. More telling than their place in the table was the dire football on show, with a considerable amount of sideways passes and not much in terms of creative dynamism on the pitch. Since Bruno’s arrival, United have won 65 points in 30 games, leading the league, with Liverpool second with 62 points in 30 games. Setting aside the team statistics for a moment, as well as Bruno’s individual accolades, if you watch a United game he’s constantly driving his team forward, through leading by example and barking at under-performers to ensure a standard of excellence.
Whilst it’ll be some time until Manchester United get to the level of excellence the Bulls experienced in the 90s (if ever), it’s a much more exciting team to watch now Bruno has injected this culture of excellence. Despite 10 other players being on the pitch, out of an overall squad of 25 players, it only took one player’s personal attitude and attributes to transform the entire culture of the team for the better. A recent example that went viral on Twitter was when Edison Cavani scored an equaliser to make it 2-2 against Southampton. Whilst the rest of the team started celebrating, Bruno ran to get the ball, barking at his teammates that the job wasn’t over, as all 3 points were still up for grabs. The result? A 3-2 victory with the third goal coming in stoppage time.
Anyone can be the catalyst for your venture, it’s about being vocal, knowing the overall objective, and holding others to a high standard of performance.
Parting Shot
Whilst the sporting examples in this newsletter have painted the high performance option in a positive light through the examples of the Chicago Bulls and Bruno Fernandes, it’s worth noting that there are certainly high performing scale-ups that have not got the balance right. Uber are one such example, where they placed considerable emphasis on achieving targets and growing the business, at the expense of (at times) moral decency and respecting their employees. As ever, balance is key.
What is your company culture? Once you’ve decided what you want it to be, it’s time to then execute.
How do employees react when things aren’t going right? How do they react when things are going right? Once target is hit, do they keep going or do they rest on their laurels?
With hiring costing a lot of money (either through outsourcing or the opportunity cost involved), it’s essential that you align the employee’s anticipated culture with the actual culture of your venture. This will ensure that they aren’t disenfranchised and that they remain with the venture.
Once employees are on-board, work out how to achieve your version of success and to continually build your culture, whether that’s a lifestyle business with a great work-life balance and associated benefits, or whether it’s more like Jordan’s Bulls, aiming for championships at the cost of being a ‘nice guy’.
Mr. Lowry shows incredible insight on the importance of culture in an organization, its impact on recruitment, team dynamics, team balance and how this underpins success. These insights are certainly transferable to start-ups in other industrial sectors and I would commend this article to those to read as they either plan launching their start-up or to assess cultural balance of their current team and its impact on delivering high performance.