Know what you need
When Dukker was interviewing a chief financial officer candidate for an early-stage business and explaining the company, the man said that he didn’t think he’d like to continue in the process. He had always had a good team of people who he could make better and had never operated without a net below him.
“There are quite a few executives who are technically superb who cannot operate in an environment where everything is not clearly defined and laid out,” he says.
Now on his sixth early-stage company, Dukker has learned that the people you need initially are different than those you need later in a company’s life.
To start, he looks for someone who has strong expertise in his or her technical area, whether it is marketing, accounting or sales. But then you have to go a step further.
“The other thing you have to look at is building a team with the right kind of contrasting and compensating personality styles and types,” Dukker says. “I tend to have a very binary view of the world, and I divide folks into what I call the process type of people, who get joy out of adjusting the dials and having the perfectly crafted, well-oiled machine versus what I call the victory dancers, who basically make the deal, jump and down they go for the brass ring, identify the opportunity and run after it.”
He says it’s important to balance your team between the two types.
“You can’t build a company that’s all one kind of personality or the other because one tends to be perspiration-based and the other tends to be inspiration-based,” he says.
Dukker says he’s more like the brass-ring person, so he needs people to help balance him out.
“You have to select personality types that complement each other to build a team that not only comes together and collaborates but, at the same time, challenges each other through different styles and different ways of looking at the common problems you have to address,” he says.
Another important aspect in putting together a team is making sure you get transparency with those you’re bringing in.
“When you recruit people from larger organizations, who have tremendous skill sets, more often, they develop styles of communication that are, for lack of a better word, political,” Dukker says. “Managing information to keep everyone well-balanced as opposed to understanding that in an early-stage company, people have to tell it like it is and be willing to accept the lumps when things are screwed up and the positive elements when they have successes.”
If you’re an early-stage business, the people who are coming in to your organization also need to be flexible.
“People need a higher degree of flexibility and willingness to share the fuzzy edges around the responsibility areas, where the greater motivation is to do what it takes to get the business growing and seize the opportunity that exists today as opposed to getting bogged down in structural or political-type issues,” he says.
Having all of these attributes is key to having a successful team of people when you’re starting to grow.
“[These] often make the difference between the kind of executives and team members who can help a small business grow quickly to become a medium and large company versus one that gets bogged down in terms of teaming difficulties, which result in grinding a boat anchor while you’re trying to run,” Dukker says.
