“In View of a Humble Vaudevillian Veteran” on Toxic Work Culture

In my early experience as an entrepreneur, building a solid team was a mantra that echoed everywhere I went. This simple message was conveyed to me by investors, by advisers, by accelerators and by fellow entrepreneurs.

StartX, a popular accelerator affiliated with Stanford University, has even told me that the idea and the progress that the company has made is less important factor for acceptance into the program compared to the solidity of a founding team.

If you are a startup, the first 10 people determine whether the company succeeds or not. ~Steve Jobs

Like most startups, my co-founder and I worked hard at trying to get the image and the message of our company just right in order to attract investors and partners, to get accepted to yet another accelerator, and to recruit new star-quality team members.

In the process, our work culture was suffering. Why?

“Cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate,” it took me many years to understand the WHY and to accept my failure in the HOW and the WHAT. On that, a little later in this story.

As a popular saying “Fail early, fail fast but always fail forward,” my early entrepreneurial experiences were filled with painful failures.

My co-founder and I started with an unshakable excitement and enthusiasm behind the question “why” this product and “why” now. We really believed in the unique offering our product was providing and could easily envision the value that it would bring to the world.

Yet, something was significantly off between the external expectations and what it took for us internally to achieve it. I could not shake the feeling off that in order for me to do well and our company to succeed, I had to go against what felt authentic and natural to me.

Even with the abundance of incredible new experiences and gained knowledge, I could not escape playing the game of chasing the next wagging tail, pretending, and over-selling. I started to believe that in order to fulfill a status quo, we were unintentionally building an internal culture of hypocrisy. Sadly, I felt that my co-founder was fully on board with it.

Maintaining a certain image externally, while having a significant conflict internally lead to a very toxic working environment for me. It continued until I was diagnosed with multiple chronic health conditions, was financially and emotionally broke, and could not find a thread of alignment with my co-founder. With a very heavy feeling of “what could I have done differently” I made the decision to leave the company I founded.

For years to come, that feeling fueled me to learn as much as I can on the subjects of leadership, team dynamic, health, psychology, emotional intelligence, higher consciousness and self-improvement hacks. With the help of some of the leading experts in team psychology and my personal intuition, I started practicing these tools in my next endeavors. With patience and openness, I got to a place where I can answer the question: Why most teams are struggling to find harmony and the most efficient way to utilize each other’s skills and talents for a common goal?

The WHAT:

The most critical component of a well-functioning team is the alignment of values. When you are just starting to build a team, it is important to discuss and define the values together with your team. Remember, values are the fundamental beliefs that govern each person. The encompassing core values of the team is like glue holding it together.

There are some values that, although different, compliment each other in a positive way, making the team more versatile. However, there are those values that do not mix well at all, leading to a significant open or inner conflict within the team. In some ways, inner conflict is the most difficult to address, as it is more subtle and can run through your team culture like a virus — hidden but highly toxic.

Looking back, my early entrepreneurial inexperience was very apparent as I didn’t trust my intuition, could not formulate and defend my values, and poorly maintained healthy emotional boundaries with my co-founder. With time it escalated to a point where my co-founder and I could not agree on anything, resulting in explosive disagreements.

Finding people with similar values is not the same as finding people with similar ideas. Avoid recruiting only people that agree with your vision and ideas and do not challenge you, otherwise you can end up with a team of clones without original thought and creativity.

The HOW:

Healthy teams are like any other relationship and require willingness to listen, to understand, to accept, to challenge and to enjoy each others company.

As difficult as it is to maintain a personal relationship (divorce rate is still close to 50%), there are multiple people working/coexisting in a team — all with different personalities, different motivations, different limitations and different talents. Without those well-developed soft skills, the team will struggle to deal with difficulties and conflicts.

Back to my personal example of toxic culture, my co-founder and I absolutely failed to listen to each other and make decisions from a place of mutual respect and consideration. Inevitably, it started to spill out into everything we did for the company and into our personal lives with significant repercussions.

If you or anyone on your team find themselves saying: “but I am right and he/she is wrong,” this is the first clue that misalignment of values and/or lack of good communication most likely at play.

The above is not a particularly new or unique definition of a good functioning team. So why is it so hard to implement it?

The WHY:

The main reason it is not trivial to build and more importantly to sustain a healthy and effective team is the lack of emotional intelligence of team members; especially of the founders.

Most founders before starting a company have a unique idea, have the right expertise in the subject matter and have enough tools and direction from advisers and investors to lead them in the right way. What the founders often lack is the ability to be aware of and cope with their own emotions and emotions of others, to deeply listen to each team member and their ideas and concerns, to control dysfunctional emotional overreaction, to be flexible and open to challenges, and to thrive in a truly interpersonal environment.

How many times have you constructed an entire explanation of another person or people without asking a single question and actually listen to the answer?

In my current team, I am pushing the envelope even further and would like to expand emotional intelligence to Team Intelligence. A relatively new construct, that I believe is necessary in today’s technology-advanced world.

I define Team intelligence as a collective consciousness of team members where emotions and intellect are deeply intertwined and drive the team to excellence.

An oversimplified formula of building a great team:

1. Start by really understanding yourself — the ins and outs of your personality, mental capacity, emotional stability, unique talents and opportunities for growth.
2. Surround yourself with people that share similar values, but can challenge you in a healthy way. Learn to be the master of your own emotions whilst being empathetic and non-judgmental of others.
3. Uncover the hidden talents of each team member and help to mold them into powerful skills. Understand that team creativity is the most powerful weapon you got.
4. Continue to be open and present to each other’s full potential. Authentic team allows for mistakes and failures with some humor, with forgiveness, and with accountability; at the same time celebrates wins as a unified front.
5. Voilà!

This approach can make all the difference in any team environment bringing great fulfillment and growth to the team.