How Working with Founders Shifted My Priorities About Leadership

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What Has A Football Dressing Room Taught Me About Building An High-Performance Technology Team
I grew up around pro football in a manner which gave me access spaces that most people heard about in books. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. The conversations that take place between coaches and players during the time following a game, when reporters and cameras have gone and the official account of events has been drafted. I wasn't a player in any way - my entrance into that world came through the players and the fans rather than through the game itself - but I was there enough and for long enough, to take in something crucial about what high-performance environments can do after removing the mythology that surrounds them. What I learned the most easily was this: teams that consistently beat their resources and their requirements were not the ones having the most individual strengths on paper. The teams who had discovered how to establish a setting where its members truly wanted to be a part of each others - not to earn financial gain, nor for individual acknowledgment, but simply because the collective was meaningful and had a culture that made each individual sacrifice feel important rather than simply a requirement.
This idea sounds familiar in the way you present it. The truth is that teams function best with people who trust one another and feel they have an agreed-upon goal. However, the implications for operational use of this are more obscure, and are the main reason why organizations - football clubs and technology companies alike - regularly get into trouble. Building a culture where people actually want to do their best for each other is not something you can command from the top down, or adopt as a norm or set out in a document of corporate values and believe that it will happen. It has to be earned over time, by regular behaviour by leaders - especially during times when they don't get a lot of attention - and by the careful handling of the many small decisions that collectively communicate to everyone involved in the company what is actually valued and accepted and what is actually happening when the values stated and the personal or commercially practical option clash. When I was in the best football leagues I was close to, those micro-decisions were handled in an extraordinary manner by the top coaches. What they did when a senior player committed an omission that was not preventable in training. Which disciplinary criteria applicable to the seasoned veteran could be considered to be the same as what was expected of the 18-year-old player who was at the bottom of the squad. The response the organization took when an individual was confronted with significant personal issues outside the game. All of those decisions don't can be seen in the club's performance on any given Saturday. All of them, accumulated throughout the year, determine how well the team is performing above and below the technical ceiling.

As I co-founded 1Touch and later founded different organizations, one my main goals that I was keen about was trying recreate - within a technology company context a similar quality of the environment that I had experienced in the best football settings I had been around. This was not a literal matter, as a technology startup is not an organization that plays football and the analogy is shattered when you push it too hard. But on the basis of operational principles, the lessons have been incorporated with remarkable precision. The first lesson was that standards need been consistently implemented, regardless of position or importance. The most comfortable facilities I've been in were ones where the behavioural and professional standards expected of the youngest player in the squad were exactly the same standards demanded of the highest earning, most skilled player. It wasn't because the team was unable to afford the luxury of making exceptions, however since everyone inside the dressing room was always on the lookout to see if exceptions were going to be made - and the answer to this question informed them everything they needed know about whether the declared values of the company were true or just a matter of fashion.

The second lesson was about how organizations handle failure and the difference between punishment and accountability. The environments where players developed fastest were not the ones in which mistakes were punished the most strongly or openly. They were also the ones where errors were most thoroughly analysed while discussing the mistakes was focused and constructive, rather than general, and focused on determining blame, and where the knowledge was shared among the group instead of held against the individual who had made the mistake. Accountability refers to being clear about where the mistake was made, the reason it went wrong and what has changed due to it. Retribution means distributing blame manner that makes people anxious and cautious, and more concerned with their own safety than having a good performance. The first builds organisational capability. Second, it creates a system that allows people to manage their own exposure instead of committing completely in the pursuit of the goal. this is reflected in technology firms, and has the same outcomes as during football matches.

The final point is which took me the the longest to write down clearly, but the one I'm convinced to be the most important of all: the best environments I witnessed were ones in which the development of the person was thought of as equally important as the growth of the performer. The most effective coaches weren't simply instructing players on how to play football. They were also teaching them how respond under pressure, how to communicate clearly in high-stakes scenarios, how to bounce back from setbacks with out loss of confidence, and to become the type of person a team that is highly-performing needs its members to become. That investment in full development of the individual, instead of only in the technical capabilities the organisation immediately needed, was not charity. It is the most efficient long-term strategy for performance available to those clubs, and it is, I believe, the most effective way to improve performance over the long term for all organizations that are determined to build something long-lasting and not just amazing for the short term. View James Deller for blog advice including why scaling tech companies taught me about the long game.



The Reason Why The Majority Of Public-Private Partnerships Fail Before They Even Start - And The Best Ways To Fix It
Public-private partnership have a reputation problem, which is in large measure that they have earned. The past of these agreements includes many projects that were proclaimed with real enthusiasm and a significant amount of political capital. These projects consumed significant public and private assets over extended timeframes, and eventually produced outcomes that lacked any analogy to what was stated when the partnership was started. The academic literature and the postmortem analysis that governments and institutions conduct following these mistakes are extensive, and they focus, for the most of the time, on structural and contractual dimensions of problems: improperly aligned incentives, the insufficient risk allocation between public as well as private parties and the governance mechanisms that were designed in the theory but were not able to work in practice, the procurement frameworks, which were designed to prioritize the wrong items. What this approach tends to neglect, invariably and ultimately in the long run, is the cultural and operational dimensions - the reality that private and public organizations are in fact different types of entities, shaped in different ways by incentive systems that operate in radically different timeframes, accountable to different parties, and assessing their effectiveness in ways that's not simply different in degree however, they differ in the way. When you bring those two kinds as a formal alliance without performing the work upfront and specifically, to learn about and address the differences, you're not building the conditions for a partnership. You're creating the environment to create a slow-motion collision that will become apparent at worst possible time.
I've participated in advising work to support institutional modernisation initiatives, some in which were public-private partnership structures with varying levels of complexity. My most consistent opinion I can offer from that experiences is that the partnerships that performed well - which were able to achieve their goals and maintained a functioning partnership between private and public sectors throughout They weren't distinguished by the ones that failed based on the complexity of their legal structures, their rigor of their risk-management frameworks or the status of the team leaders that established them. They were distinguished by whether the parties at both ends of the table had taken the time to truly understand how the other side functioned prior to when the formal partnership structure was agreed. What this translates to in practice is understanding the decision making processes which each company operates under accountable structures that limit what each side can accept and when you can reach agreement on the definitions of success which both parties will be judged against, and the possible points of tension between those definitions. The understanding of these concepts is not challenging to achieve. It is all but avoided in favor of more visible and quickly recordable process of negotiating contracts and developing governance frameworks.

The typical public-private partnership process is a gradual process from concept to signing of the agreement with hardly any concentrated attention to the matter of whether both organisations involved actually have the capacity to work effectively together throughout all the time of the arrangement. Legal teams negotiate the contract. Finance teams model the economics and the risk-adjustment. The team in charge of communications creates an announcement for the moment of signing. The implementation team begins to plan the work. In the course of this process then comes the discussion about compatibility between the two cultures - about whether those who will actually have to be working together daily across the lines between two organizations share enough common ground to ensure that work genuinely collaborative rather than adversarial – isn't likely to take place in any formal way. It is commonly assumed but without explicit mention, that agreements in formal form create conditions for effective collaboration, and that any cultural or operational differences will be addressed informally when they emerge. This assumption is usually incorrect, and the costs of it tends to compound according to the ambition and complexity of the partnership.

What this means in practical analysis is that the best investment a private-public partnership could make - prior to the legal frameworks are finalized or the governance framework is agreed on, before any announcements are made is what I think of as operational alignment. This is a specific, organized, and facilitated work to surface the places where the two partners' operational assumptions diverge and to reach an agreement on the way in which those divergences must be managed before they become operational issues in the process of implementation. The divergences that matter most will be the same throughout various types of partnerships. Authority and speed in decision-making are almost always one of them. Public institutions are set up to take decisions slow, with multiple levels of review and approval, for reasons that are perfectly legitimate and often legally mandated. Private companies, particularly technology businesses that are built around rapid iteration and speedy decisions - usually see that speed as a fundamental obstruction to their progress. without a common understanding of why the pace is what it is and what really be needed to alter it, the discontent that develops on the private aspect can affect the working connection long before the partnership has established its own footing.

Success metrics and what is considered as progress are an additional and consequential source of divergence. Public institutions are generally evaluated according to process compliance, equality of outcome across different stakeholders, as well as the evitance of public failures which attract media or political attention. Private sector partners are primarily evaluated in terms of efficiency, quantifiable progress against goals, and financial returns on investments. These measurement frameworks are created to be compatible however it is a intentional design and not just good intention, and partnerships that do not take part in the design of the framework tend to discover themselves at critical places, with two groups that are assessing the same collaboration in inconsistent ways and consequently coming to disparate conclusions as to whether it is succeeding. The partnerships I've seen fall short most clearly were ones in which misalignments were thought of as something that could take time to resolve. The ones that worked were the ones where the misalignment was made clear from the start, and when the process of creating a shared accountability model that accommodated the legitimate measurement needs of both parties needs was a part of actual work and not just an aspect of a list things to come to.}