“Be Self-Starting” is a straightforward valuable addition to our culture list. Self-starting employees are more productive for a startup, and self-starting startup environments are more exciting for employees.
So how can startups encourage and foster a self-starting culture? Here are some ideas:
Engineering & Customer Support
- During the hiring process, look for hackers that code/tinker in their free time
- Encourage engineers to see the bigger picture when working on projects rather than going down rabbit holes
- Encourage healthy debate among engineers about development approaches, being careful not to criticize ideas and brainstorms
- Sometimes engineers want to work on projects that are not top of the priority queue. Find ways to match “engineer wants” with “development priorities”.
- Reward initiative with praise and bonus awards
Sales & Marketing
- During the hiring process, try to get a sense for things that the candidate might do to generate leads which go beyond merely processing inbound traffic.
- In the early days of a startup, encourage marketing people to wear many hats, tackling as much as possible in business development and partnerships, product management, outbound marketing (including tradeshows, press relations, twitter, etc), inbound marketing (including website). Self-starting for marketing means being smart about how the startup spends its time and money in building awareness and generating leads.
- Early salespeople should also do more than just process inbound traffic, including building surveys to guide product development, working closely with customer support, serving as client advocates, coordinating webinars, and more.
How do you encourage a self-starting culture? Do you have any tips on filtering for self-starting individuals during the hiring process?
Related articles
How do you figure out how to tie what the engineers want to do to the priorities?
In the end, we only really work on priorities. But through regular one-on-one conversations with engineers, you can listen to the things they want to work on. Oftentimes, those conversation lead to one of two outcomes:
1) The engineer conveys information that bumps up the priority of the thing they want to do so that it actually becomes the-priority-thing-to-do. This is akin to the Steve Jobs customers-don’t-know-what-they-want mentality, where internally you can have ideas about what to build that no customer would suggest directly.
or
2) The engineer realizes that what they want to do is not really a good use of their time, so they latch onto “wanting” to do a real company priority.
A manager can best direct these conversations by doing more listening and thoughtful question-asking than opinion pushing.
You might not always get things to neatly shake out definitively into one of those two buckets, but it’s worth the time to communicate regularly with engineers individually to keep mutual understanding high.
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