The Bonfire Moment

Transcript

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to our weekly LinkedIn Live session, celebrating the brightest new voices and ideas in the world of management thinking. In January, we announced the Thinkers50 Radar List for 2024, 30 exciting rising stars in management thinking brought to you in partnership with Deloitte. A key theme for this year’s Radar is making workplaces more inclusive and healthy for everyone. As you might expect, too, artificial intelligence and all things digital loom large as indeed does sustainability. But startups and the entrepreneurs who found them are the lifeblood of any economy and are our topic for today.

Now, those of you who join us regularly know that we like to make these sessions as interactive as possible, so please do let us know where you are joining us from and put your questions in the chat box at any time during the course of the session, and I will do my very best to put them to our guest. Now he is Martin Gonzalez. Martin is the co-creator of Google’s Effective Founders Project, a global research programme that decodes the factors that enable startup founders to succeed. He also works closely with Google’s engineering and research leaders on organisational design, leadership and culture challenges. Martin is a frequent lecturer at Stanford, Wharton and INSEAD and has advised leaders on four continents. His new book with Josh Yellin is entitled The Bonfire Moment: Bring Your Team Together to Solve the Hardest Problems Startups Face. It’s just been published, I mean literally just been published, hot off the press by Harper Business. Martin, welcome.

Martin Gonzalez:

It’s so good to be here. Des. Thank you for having me.

Des Dearlove:

Congratulations on making the Thinkers50 Radar list and big congratulations on the book.

Martin Gonzalez:

Thank you. It’s been such an honour to be part of this list.

Des Dearlove:

The book literally is hot off the press. I’m right in saying it’s just come out?

Martin Gonzalez:

That’s right.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah.

Martin Gonzalez:

Bud day was yesterday, so we’re in the thick of things.

Des Dearlove:

Very cool. Great title for a book, The Bonfire Moment. Where does that come from?

Martin Gonzalez:

So I must confess, and maybe the first time in public, I actually didn’t love the title when it first-

Des Dearlove:

Oh, okay.

Martin Gonzalez:

… when we first came up with it. Then over time we scoured the universe for title options and I realised actually, this could be a really good one. So The Bonfire Moment comes from a workshop that we had done for startups, and it really comes from that acknowledgement that the experience of being in a startup where you’re trying to make the impossible happen under intense constraints, it feels like you’re dancing in the flames constantly, like you’re constantly in the inferno of a bonfire. The Bonfire Moment is a day that we invite teams to invest and to step out of that fire even just for a day to examine it, to look at each other and see how we might want to engage differently, bandage up relational wounds, prepare for that next push. Crucially, it’s a bonfire moment and not a campfire moment. The experience of this one day is not one of the warm and fuzzies. It’s actually a pretty intense, oftentimes very uncomfortable day that we structure for teams.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, well, we’ll get into some of that and why it might be uncomfortable, but I want to take you just back a step because I mentioned the Effective Founders Project. Tell us a little bit, ’cause that sets the scene for the book. Tell us how-

Martin Gonzalez:

That’s right.

Des Dearlove:

If you could just tell us a little bit about the journey that you’ve been on to land at Google with doing that and what that’s trying to measure, trying to understand.

Martin Gonzalez:

Yeah. So really, at the beginning of this journey, this takes us back to 2015 where Josh is actually… we had just joined Google and he was building out Google’s first ever accelerator program. At this time, I was in our org development team supporting our leaders. I was based in Singapore back then, and there was nothing in the accelerator around people and culture. I thought alongside machine learning, which was before AI was the hot word, it was machine learning next to growth and marketing and design workshops. I told Josh, “Hey, let me do some of the research and let’s see if we should integrate some additional stuff here.” I came across this really classic study from Harvard and McKinsey researchers that surveyed VCs and asked them, “Of the companies that had failed recently in your portfolio, what were the top reasons for failure?” The study showed that 65% of those failed startups failed because of people-related problems. It was co-founder conflict. It was a poorly set-up senior leadership team. It was fights about strategy and pivoting and spending cash. I thought, “Great, okay, so this is the inspiration. Let’s test something very basic.”

So I asked for a small budget from Josh, and I said, “Let’s do a no-frills leadership workshop. Let’s take what we believe to be the best ways that we develop leaders at Google, tailor it and bring in the state-of-the-art research around startups and let’s offer something.” So we ran a very simple pilot in Jakarta, and it was a group of, I think, about 18 founders. This workshop within the larger accelerator program was rated the most helpful, the most useful part of the accelerator experience. We thought, “Okay, perhaps there was something anomalous here, let’s try it again.” We bring it to Bangalore, and again, it’s the highest rated part of this accelerator. By the way, many parts of this accelerator were incredibly compelling workshops. The first time it leaves Asia is we bring it to Sao Paulo and then we eventually bring it to Warsaw and basically, it consistently becomes this high-rated…

At some point, Josh was telling me and a few other program managers and accelerator, they were saying that at some point startups were actually coming to the accelerator hoping to get ahold of this workshop and the tools. Now at some point, as I was bringing this, I remember the first time was when we brought this to Johannesburg, one of the founders there said, “Hey, where’s the book that captures all of this?” At that point, this was maybe about five, six years ago, there was nothing. But the turning point where we said, “We need to turn this into a proper research exercise,” was there was a founder, we were in San Francisco and it was a crowded room of founders. I remember at the back of the room, someone from the Philippines where I grew up, he was American but was building a startup in the Philippines. In that session we were talking about how Google thinks about its culture and what it does, and he raised his hand. He says, “Great, that’s what Google does, but what do you think I should do in my startup?”

It was a moment where I realised we needed to be a lot more responsible in the way we give advice because these very fragile startups and these founders who are so much in need of guidance, they will take our word for it and they will run with the advice we give, and so it behoves us to really do the research well. That’s where the germ of the idea of the Effective Founders Project was born. There are a few facets of the Effective Founders Project, but one of the main things then was our first report back in 2022 was we baked into these workshops a very basic 360-degree feedback survey. At some point, we realised we were sitting on something like 900 of these reports and thousands of lines of data. We thought we should just spend the time to apply the people analytics protocols to this and see what we can find. That’s where the Effective Founders Project report first comes out in 2020, which draws interest from our publisher, which then becomes the book which we published the next year.

Des Dearlove:

That’s how often there is a backstory quite often to a book. A lot of books don’t just suddenly pop out, they have a long gestation period. The other interesting thing I was interested in, obviously you’ve taken this workshop on a world tour, by the sounds of it. Sounds like you’ve been all over the place with it, which is really interesting, and say 900 entrepreneurs, founders, but I think it’s very international as well. Apart from the fact that you’ve workshopped it all over the world, you’re covering a lot of countries.

Martin Gonzalez:

Yeah. So it was 900 when we did that first version of the report, but today the program has reached thousands of founders in, I think the number’s something like 10,000 founders across 70 countries. It continues to get scaled beyond, so yeah.

Des Dearlove:

Amazing. As I hoped would happen, I can see that we’ve got people joining us from all over. We’ve got people from Switzerland, Chicago, Toronto, UK, Poland, New York, Mountain View, so you are talking to an international audience. So I think it’s really useful to register that point that it is not just a Silicon Valley phenomenon, it’s not just the United States or even just North America.

Martin Gonzalez:

I should add, Des, that from the very beginning, the idea was, how do we break out of the Silicon Valley dependency and support startup hubs ecosystems all around the world? Our data set is very thin when it comes to Silicon Valley-based startups. A lot of it is really everywhere else.

Des Dearlove:

No, that’s really interesting. Now, one of the central messages here is that most startups don’t fail because of bad timing or mismanaged cash flow or because they’ve got the wrong product. What you’re saying is that the evidence suggests that most startups fail because of the soft stuff, because of people issues, conflicts between founders, all those sorts of things. In the book you’ve identified four classic traps that people fall into.

Martin Gonzalez:

Yeah.

Des Dearlove:

Let’s perhaps talk through four traps.

Martin Gonzalez:

Yeah.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah.

Martin Gonzalez:

By the way, as we get into the four traps, something perhaps to say is I think a big reason why the people issues are the biggest killer is a lot of these founders come into this work really not thinking about wanting to build a company. They come in to build an amazing product, and they very quickly realise that they need to surround this product with people who will then scale the ideas and they realise that ideas are cheap and it’s really execution. Therefore, people and the culture that really matter so much more.

Des Dearlove:

I think you’re right. Sorry, I was just going to add to that. I had a… I was lucky to spend a couple of days with Reed Hastings who… one of the founders of Netflix… He said all of that stuff. The first company he started, he had no idea that you have to create process and if you over process, you end up with a bureaucracy and if you under process, you end up with chaos. It’s really difficult-

Martin Gonzalez:

That’s right.

Des Dearlove:

… to get that balance right.

Martin Gonzalez:

Yeah, that’s right. No, that’s absolutely right. You can hear it in our language too. We write in the book how we’ll sometimes say, “Oh, it’s not rocket science.” What’s ironic about a statement like that is we’re incredibly good at rocket science. We can actually land someone on the moon within, I think, it’s two kilometres of our estimated target landing point, but with people it’s so much more unpredictable. So in the book we try to summarise for folks, we start by saying, “Look, the journey of starting a company, and by the way, if you were in an innovation team within a larger company, this also very much applies-

Des Dearlove:

I was going to ask that, yeah.

Martin Gonzalez:

… that journey is not simple.” You can’t easily put it into a formula. But what we try in the book is we say, look, but here what we’ve seen repeatedly happen, traps that founders fall into. We’re deliberate about the word traps because it’s something that’s alluring that has a lot of positives, but also has a lot of unseen negatives that we want to raise awareness to. So it’s a trap of speed, it’s a trap of the inner circle, the trap of the maverick mindset and the trap of confidence.

Des Dearlove:

Okay. Let’s start to unpack those if we may-

Martin Gonzalez:

Yes.

Des Dearlove:

… if we can take them one at a time. So let’s talk about the trap of speed. What does that look like?

Martin Gonzalez:

So the trap of speed really starts with the premise that under extreme tight timelines and constraints, really, speed is what matters in building these companies. You want to keep your burn rate down. You want to make sure you’re launching a product. But what we find is that when startups are optimising for that short game, they lose sight of the long game. There are long-game decisions that we see founders make mistakes on on day one and also on day 500. Day one, long-game mistakes are: Who are the co-founders that you decide to bring on board? How robust is that conversation upfront around what if we don’t scale with the business? Or what if we pivot and the skill sets that I brought these other co-founders for are becoming relevant, what do we do then? How do we split equity?

By the way, the biggest in these early days is founders who are very inexperienced and who avoid the uncomfortable conversations to split equity equally. That implies that you are going to contribute equally to the startup, which almost always never happens. Then there are day 500 long-game decisions that they do pretty sloppily, such as, what is your hiring profile? Do you give out fancy titles just to attract really good talent? Are you very quick to stem? So we talk about in the book what behavioural economists would call hyperbolic discounting, which is when the rewards of something come out, come to you immediately, we tend to be really good at valuing those benefits. When the benefits come at a much later date, we somehow apply a discount factor. We push it out not just because we are procrastinating, but inherently, we see it as slightly less valuable. So we help through the book leaders to really make sure that you are… we’re not asking them to spend all their time on the long game, but you want to spend some amounts of time really thinking about that long game.

Des Dearlove:

What you’re saying so, basically, the quick wins are where people are focused in terms of wanting to see results next week rather than let’s lay the foundation for even better results in two years’ time or three years’ time.

Martin Gonzalez:

That’s right, and what we do in the chapter on the trap of speed is we lay out the 20 sources of team drag is what we call it. It’s a play on this idea that when you’re building a race car, an amateur would think, oh, to build a race car, you need a really strong engine. But actually the people who actually build race cars realise that you need a strong engine, but you also need aerodynamics because speed creates drag and drag will in turn reduce your speed. So you need to think about what are those decisions early on that will create drag down the line as your startup heats up?

Des Dearlove:

Can you give us an example, what typically are the big drag factors? The dragons?

Martin Gonzalez:

Yeah, a few of my favourites in that list, we talk about the invisible founder and how you need to agree upfront who’s going to be the face of the work to the public. So we’ve heard stories of people who get invited by TechCrunch or by some media outfit, and it’s one person that they want to interview, who will that person be? We talk about how do we want to spend our cash? Are we interested in lavish office spaces or do we build this scrappily as long as we can? If the startup needs to proceed without one of the co-founders, what is a fair way to go about that conversation? It’s all these many things around how do you onboard people? What is the role of friendships outside of work? Do we expect people to work part-time, full-time, all the time? Why are we building this startup? So  

Des Dearlove:

Okay, so that’s trap number one. You can tell me otherwise, but I don’t think these are particularly in an order, but there are four of them, and we are going to get through them. So the second one is the trap of the inner circle. How does that go?

Martin Gonzalez:

So the trap of the inner circle starts with the idea that when you have a pitch deck and a work ethic and really nothing else, no track record, no product, usually the people who are willing to go along with you are people who either love and know you, i.e., your friends, sometimes your family, or maybe a former collaborator who knows you really well. What’s interesting about the early formations of those types of teams with those origin stories is the cost of those relationships are extremely high because not only do you have a professional relationship, but you also have a personal relationship. So what we find, and this is from research from Noam Wasserman who was then in Harvard Business School, we then therefore see teams therefore are less interested or less willing to have the tough conversations.

So these inner circles, while it’s expedient to build teams using your inner circle, it actually is resistant to disagreement, to productive contention. Actually, one of my favourite stories in that chapter is we talk about a character in the history books of computer science. His name is Bob Taylor. He was a lab manager in Xerox PARC. Xerox PARC is… it’s not well known these days, but in the late ’70s and early ’80s was probably one of the most prolific places for innovation. This is where you get the personal computer; this is where you get Apple’s technology, Microsoft to some extent, Adobe Pixar, 3Com, it was where innovation thrived. He said the following, he said, “My job as the leader in this lab is to make sure that Class One disagreements graduate the Class Two disagreements.”

He talks about Class One disagreements as really ultimately what you would call a straw man argument, which is, “I hear your argument does… Let me represent your argument in the weakest form possible, making it easy for me to then refute it.” A Class Two disagreement is where, Des, you create a strongman argument where I say, Des, here are the merits. Here’s the best part of your argument. Are you satisfied in the way I’ve represented it? Then here’s my other opposing point of view. Bob says, “It’s not my role to resolve disagreement, it’s my role to make sure that every Class One disagreement graduates to a Class Two disagreement. So we tell a lot of startups and a lot of teams like, look, if you’ve built your team around former friends and former colleagues and former family members, don’t worry. It doesn’t mean that you’re bound for failure. It just means that you need to work doubly hard.

Des Dearlove:

So that was trap number two. Let’s talk about trap number three.

Martin Gonzalez:

So the trap of the maverick mindset. So we find founders who approach their industries with this disruptor innovative maverick mindset also then look towards the people issues and say, “We’re going to break the mould here, and we’re going to innovate on the people stuff,” and we want that. We want that, but we also want founders to recognize that technology is going to run faster than human evolution will. So what you’re dealing with, the organisational factors, those people factors that you’re dealing with, some of these are fairly universal and fairly stable factors. So we thought about a few of these myths that founders want to believe in and would be amazing if true, but actually, a lot of evidence suggests otherwise. So one of them is the myth of scaling without hierarchy where there’s this glamorization of this egalitarian form of organising where we’re fully self-organised, managers are evil, we don’t need any of that.

There’s interesting work out of Wharton by a researcher named Ronnie Nong. He looks at gaming studios, and he looks at how adding a single layer of hierarchy, what does it do to 1), the creativity of the games that they publish, and to the commercial viability or the commercial success. He discovers that adding one layer of management actually equates to yes, 1% decline in originality and based on customer reviews, so it verifies the fear of a lot of these mavericks. But for that 1% that you decline in originality through customer reviews, you gain a 14% upside in terms of commercial success around sales. So it’s a good lesson in that a healthy hierarchy, a healthy layer of managers can actually help reduce a lot of the operational ambiguities that teams need… teams need focus, they need to know what the priorities are for their little silo to be able to run fast and achieve these commercial goals.

We talk about the myth of structural harmony, which is, as you scale, you will start to discover that there are conflicts within the team that are actually really healthy. What that might mean is that sales and marketing are at odds with each other, or supply chain and marketing are at odds, or the hardware team and the software team can’t agree on timelines. Some of those are actually built in checks and balances within the organisation and a more seasoned executive will actually see that as a really positive way of setting up the organisation. We don’t want founders to approach this and think, “Oh, I had dreamt of building the prized culture and now that I see these conflicts, is my culture going down the drain?” Really, some of that you want actually; you want structural conflict to happen within your company. So those are a few, and there are four others that we talk about in that chapter.

Des Dearlove:

OK presumably too in this, is management processes because, again, founders sometimes think they can, with a startup, “We don’t need any of that stuff. We got-

Martin Gonzalez:

Absolutely. And the way we actually approach… and back to your comment on Reed Hastings, we talk about the myth of sustained heroics and how founders who have a strong sense of ownership, but they also have a literal ownership in the company, they will build a company based on heroic effort, and they demand that of their people because that’s how you get to great innovation. But they forget that when you rely on heroics, you create single point dependencies and therefore single points of failure. So you don’t want that. You want to build in the right amount of systems so you don’t have chaos.

Des Dearlove:

The thing there too is, if everything has got to be heroic, then you’re going to burn your people out quite quickly as well.

Martin Gonzalez:

You will burn your people out, and then beyond that, there’s this dynamic that psychologists would call overfunctioning and underfunctioning dynamic. What that looks like is when you are an overfunctioning team member, a few things happen. Your teammates begin to rely on you to be that over-functioning individual. They will then start to lean back on what maybe originally was their contribution or their sense of ownership. Then another thing happens to the overperformer, which is they start to look at everyone else as either incompetent, lazy or just inept. That further exacerbates this issue of heroics. Now heroics is required for incredible things to happen, but if you want to build an enduring company, you can’t build it on heroics.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, we’ve got one more trap to do. I can see there’s some questions starting to come in. So the fourth trap is the trap of confidence.

Martin Gonzalez:

The trap of confidence, and this trap really talks about how overconfidence is almost a prerequisite to get started. If founders actually knew what it would take to get to their goals, they probably wouldn’t start. So there needs to be some amount of delusion at the start of the journey, but then that overconfidence almost becomes exclusively a liability beyond that initial point. Then more so, we find that founders expect that as they get started, their confidence just continues to rise. They’ll start feeling very insecure and then their confidence will just rise. What we find from our data, and we see this from other data sets too, is that confidence is typically highest at the beginning of the journey.

The moment you begin to realise what great looks like and that it’s actually not as simple as what you imagine it to be, then you take a real hit in your self-confidence. Some people have talked about this as a Dunning-Kruger effect – Dunning and Kruger are two psychologists who, I guess, met in Cornell University, and I think they’re in different institutions today – but it’s this idea that if you were to think that your insecurity in this journey is a sign of future failure, really, what the data shows is it’s a sign of growth and that you need to keep on going and you need to realise that there are upsides to this imposter syndrome that you might be feeling.

This is well-documented now in the literature. When you are underconfident, we know that you will tend to prepare more, you will tend to ask for help more, and you will tend to not assume that people are receiving your product or service in the way that you imagine it to be, so you’ll be a lot more open to customer feedback. So there’s a lot of upside to this. I think so far a lot of the zeitgeist around imposter syndrome and self-doubt and underconfidence is one of a negative frame that, oh, we just need to overcome it. We need to get over ourselves. But in some ways, you won’t achieve that, but also you need to appreciate the value of that.

Des Dearlove:

You probably know that within the Thinkers50 community and within the Radar List, Basima Tewfik who’s done quite a lot of this research around imposter…

Martin Gonzalez:

That’s right.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, saying exactly the way you described it, that actually we shouldn’t necessarily always cast it as a negative.

Martin Gonzalez:

That’s right. Sure.

Des Dearlove:

It can be very useful to be a bit more open to doubt and questioning, and it can make you more inclined to talk to other people and receive other people’s perspectives.

Martin Gonzalez:

100%. I think Basima’s work is incredible, yeah, very useful for the world.

Des Dearlove:

Okay. We’re going to get on and talk about the solutions to these traps or what we can do through the workshop, but I’ve got a couple of questions here.

Martin Gonzalez:

Yeah.

Des Dearlove:

People are very interested to know a little bit more about the key elements of a startup culture and how one might establish them. This was one of the points that Reed made, was you’re so busy getting on with the business that you don’t sit down and even think really about creating a culture. Everybody to begin with is outward looking into the marketplace. Nobody is taking care of what’s at home if you get my metaphor.

Martin Gonzalez:

Yeah. Yeah.

Des Dearlove:

Does culture evolve naturally or is it something you have to actually say, “All right, we’re going to build a culture now?”

Martin Gonzalez:

Well, so one thing I tell founders is that the way the founding team operates really becomes the default setting, the default calibration of-

Des Dearlove:

Okay.

Martin Gonzalez:

… your team’s culture. So you need to get that initial team dynamic really right, because it just scales from there. There’s some really interesting research from Stanford called the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies. They look at how there isn’t actually one successful way to build a culture. They call them organisational blueprints, there are gives and takes. So in that study, to summarise it in 30 seconds, there are five different archetypes or blueprints.

Des Dearlove:

Martin, you can have more than 30 seconds. You can have a whole minute.

Martin Gonzalez:

Okay, great.

Des Dearlove:

Don’t feel rushed, please don’t.

Martin Gonzalez:

So they find that there are five very dominant ways that startups organise themselves. So there is the star organisation where you hire brilliant people and you give them extreme amounts of independence and it’s purely self-managed. Then you have the commitment organisation where you optimise for cultural fit, and you find people who are going to be loyal to the company, and then you have these autocratic blueprints, etc. What was interesting about that study was they found that when you are working towards really big ambitious goals, you will tend to organise in a star model type of way where you’re hiring incredible talent. Perhaps not talent that is world-class skills, but extreme amounts of potential, so brilliant people coming out of college, working on things that have never been built before. What they find from that study is that that kind of model, because they’re working towards really difficult goals, the risk of them failing is pretty high and therefore, the risk of them reaching the IPO stage is pretty low.

But when they do reach the IPO stage, their growth in market capitalization outperforms all the other models. Then you take the commitment model, which optimises for cultural fit and for people who want to stay long in these environments, and what they find is that these companies tend to be very stable, and the rate of them failing and closing shop is extremely low. But then after they reach the IPO stage, the growth in market cap isn’t nearly as interesting. Part of the reason that they explain is that it becomes such an asset for a team to be very single-minded in the way they march forward towards these single-minded goals. But post-IPO, when you start to expand to new markets or build new business units and tap into new talent pools, that homogeneity becomes somewhat of a liability. Whereas in the star model, you have an extreme amount of diversity in skill sets and thinking and all that, and that allows them to propel forward beyond IPO.

Des Dearlove:

That’s really interesting. Okay, so we’ve talked about the four traps. I’m guessing that the workshop is a way to address those traps, but what can people do if they’re aware of, as you said, your mission is to really help educate founders? So what can they do to either avoid the traps or get themselves out of the traps when they’re in them?

Martin Gonzalez:

Yeah, so the book does two things. So part one of the book is we really talk about these traps and help people identify if their teams are going through them or falling into them. Then the second part of the book is we open-source the workshop. We basically lay it out as, here is the day that you need to set aside. You can have a facilitator, you can self-facilitate. We split up the eight-hour day into four blocks, and each chapter is a block and we invite them… and you know, the startup ecosystem, they love to DIY things, part of why we were open sourcing this workshop. I’ve had people ask me, “Why are you doing this, Martin? Why don’t you just launch a consulting business so people could then hire you?” Really, our goal is not to be the bottleneck of this work. Our goal is to give it out to as many people as possible for as free as possible. You’d have to buy the book, which is what, 30 bucks in the U.S.

So what we do in the book is we lay it out pretty concretely, and let me run you through quickly what the experience looks like. So block one is where we invite people to face hard truths about how they’re showing up in the company. We open source the assessment tools that we’ve run in these 70 countries. You either self-assess against this data set of founders and leaders from around the world, or you can optionally do a 360. This is usually more useful when the company’s a little bit older where you actually have people to invite feedback from. For those who aren’t familiar with a 360, I’m throwing out this jargon willy-nilly, but a 360 is where you invite your peers, your direct reports, your investors, perhaps, your managers for feedback. We didn’t invent this, obviously. It’s been actually an important part of leadership development for maybe the past, I don’t know, 40, 50 years?

Des Dearlove:

Yeah.

Martin Gonzalez:

But I should say it’s been reserved for the big money leadership development programs, and our hope is to give it out and make it as accessible as possible. So that’s the first step. Then we create a structured way where the team can coach each other through the biggest gaps in their abilities or behaviours as a team member. Then the second block is where we invite people to write up what we call a user guide. This is something that Google leaders and Googlers love to do, and there’s some really popular user guides within Google, but we take that concept and we structure it out for a startup and it’s a guide… the idea is that usually we don’t come with manuals; when you buy a piece of technology, it comes with a manual, it tells you how to install it, uninstall it, troubleshoot issues with it. So this is the idea that let me come up with a manual that people can then help troubleshoot me using this manual that asks questions such as, why are you here? What is the best way to give me feedback? How do I like to resolve conflict? If we were to fail because of the team, what might be those reasons for it and how do we anticipate some of that?

Des Dearlove:

So this is a user guide for team members. We’re not talking about a user guide to the culture of the organisation. Each of these user guides will be different because they go with each-

Martin Gonzalez:

That’s right.

Des Dearlove:

… personality. Okay. I see.Thaat’s interesting.

Martin Gonzalez:

I’ve had founders come up to me and say, “Hey, I don’t agree with this idea of being used by my team.” I’m like, “Yeah, I agree. This is not Machiavellian… we are not merely a tool term, but just think of the analogy as a way to generously share with your teammates on how best to work with you.” 

Then we arrive at the third block, which for me, is the most vulnerable part of the experience. We affectionately call it the bullshit circle. The bullshit circle is where we invite people to reflect on the insecurities and self-doubts that they bring to the work. Then what are the masks, what are the coping mechanisms I use? What are my stress responses when I’m under extreme amounts of self-doubt? We invite people to reflect on what we found to be three very common ways that founders or leaders and people really mask a lot of their self-doubt.

It’s usually through false detachment, sorry, false optimism, false strength or false detachment. False optimism is you project a lot more helpfulness and positivity. False strength is where you project a lot of your prestige, your achievements, your past successes as a way to get through some of these moments. Then finally, a false sense of detachment is where people react in these moments by being incognito or trying to project calm and independence. We invite founders to reflect on and leaders to reflect on what is the one, two or three things that you tend to use, and it’s a really vulnerable moment for folks. If people want to go even further, we actually set up a digital bonfire or a campfire.

We don’t want to burn anything, but where we bring out laptops and you change the environment so people can get into that mode. Then finally, we reach the last block of the experience where we invite people to begin to resolve some of the unspoken issues of the team. So we bring up this list of 10 sources of conflict we’ve seen, and we invite folks to read through this list and consider which of these items are they going through at the moment or expect that they might want to anticipate or that they expect they will go through in the coming months and then talk about it and have a plan. Usually, at this point, with all that built-up openness and vulnerability, those tend to be really productive conversations. So you close the day, as you can imagine, exhausted, very uncomfortable through the day, but feeling more optimistic, more connected to the team and have a plan of how you would move forward together.

Des Dearlove:

Some of the issues, you said there were 10, you’ve identified 10 issues, there were more-

Martin Gonzalez:

There are 20.

Des Dearlove:

Okay. Sorry.

Martin Gonzalez:

Yeah.

Des Dearlove:

Just give us a flavour. We don’t need all of them, but just an idea.

Martin Gonzalez:

Yeah, it’s things like, are we marching towards a higher mission and has that been communicated to the team? Do we have the right variety of skill sets to succeed in this team? Do we hire for company fit or otherwise, how do we deal with gossip in this team and so on and so forth? It’s a really valuable list of things that I think we just don’t think about as we’re going about the work.

Des Dearlove:

Okay. I’m looking across to see, ’cause inevitably, I knew this would happen, we are going to run out of time. But let me see if I can just pull up another question. Alexandra asks, “What would you advise a person who is feeling stagnant and unfulfilled in their job? It’s either staying for the stability or pursuing a passion which may not be as financially secure. How would you navigate the decision making process?” She’s asking for-

Martin Gonzalez:

Asking for a friend.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah.

Martin Gonzalez:

That’s right. I can relate so much to this. I go by the aphorism: love it, change it, or leave it. I agree that there are financial considerations here, but I think the financial considerations are probably not as severe as maybe we sometimes play out in our heads. So if you don’t love it, find a way to change it. There’s actually really cool research around job crafting. Within the edges of one’s job, you could actually find pockets where it brings you a lot of energy and how can you maybe ever so slowly increase those pockets that bring you energy?

One of the best pieces of advice I was given at a very early stage of my career was to say, “Look, every job is crappy in some way, and it’s useful to think of a job in thirds. 1/3 is going to be exciting, exhilarating. There’s rock music playing as you’re going about the work. A third is going to be not quite as exciting, a bit to use the Gen Z language, a bit mid. Then there’s that part which is just the minutiae of the work. It just kills you one day at a time.” That’s been incredibly useful for me to think about how no job is perfect and you just need to have the stomach for that 1/3 that just really kills you.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, no, I would add to that, I like this job crafting. It’s always worth talking to your colleagues and saying, “How can we provide the personal and professional development that I’m looking for within the bounds of the organisation?” At least having the conversation because sometimes people really want to help and don’t know that you are not enjoying it anymore, that you’ve become stagnant. Martin-

Martin Gonzalez:

That’s right.

Des Dearlove:

… one thing that you want people who are listening to this to take away, what would be the one thing you want them to take away?

Martin Gonzalez:

I would say that as you’re going about the work of building these teams, the number one message of our book is that building teams is harder than building tech, and so don’t take that for granted.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, well, I know where people can go to find out more. They can buy a copy of the book. It’s called The Bonfire Moment: Bring Your Team Together to Solve the Hardest Problem Startups Face. Martin, thank you so much, really enjoyed talking to you.

Martin Gonzalez:

I enjoyed it as well, Des.