Diversity and Scalability — Inextricable Engines of Growth
Diversity is the representation of different groups of people from all walks of life, with unique life stories and varied specialisms. It matters. Not just an Ideal. It matters because it is an enabler for growth.
I was recently at EthCC Paris 2019. It is a major Ethereum conference for the community. One of the talks that impacted me was conducted by Ethereum Magicians on the roadmap for our world computer, which has a market cap of 14.4 Billion at the time of this writing. For something so serious that has the potential to change the future, there were surprisingly very few women in the room talking about it.
The Ethereum community though, is very open and encouraging. My challenge is encouraging girls and youths to look at blockchain and emerging technology as an interesting industry to be. The challenge is also not just to convince one or two girls to get excited about technology. The challenge is to do it at scale. This has been described by Ben Horowitz as a black art.
According to HBR research — for scalability to happen. Teams need to hire functional experts to bring it to the next level, add management structure while maintaining informal ties; spell out and reinforce cultural values that will sustain the business. Structure is needed as they handle different avenues of growth. Managing that culture is tricky as well, because initial startup members will need to find their own bosses and recognise that they are at their limit. We also can lose track of our people, so it’s necessary to have social events and team building. Finding your place in a growing organisation can also be a struggle too.
At our KCL Blockchain team — our core values are: Hustle, Equal Stake, Outcome Driven, Openness. The key here is openness. It is a costly value to have. It means we recognise the fluidity of talent. They will always go to the best places and can leave easily. We also recognise that the majority in the team might be fairly inexperienced, in the student team context. This means there’s a need for w training to up skill team members. It is a high investment of time and energy.
In the initial phases of growth in our first year of operation. We had a severe lack of women. Things were tricky at times. As a leader, my team helped me by pointing out that I had a tendency to act in certain ways that unaware to me was hurtful. Some felt that despite the best efforts of securing internships and jobs, I did not value my team members. It was hurtful. Until that time, our team had good work done but this was done with much micro-managing. It was not sustainable as we created single points of failure. It was not a scalable enterprise. This is a trap most amateurs fall into. It is easy to spot.
It was a problem that kept me awake. I experimented with a decentralised philosophy for an entire semester believing that it would be solution. The results can only be described as the actualisation of the State of Nature. Everything had rights, but no way to operationalise them. People were lost. Things was not done. We stalled. Output was low.
Reflection and Reorganisation was needed to ensure the project continued sustainably. One of the things that our team champions is the development of one’s passions. The pre-requisite of that is a division of labour and specialisation; and that was what we did. We had to promote certain people into leadership and give others specialised roles. With better clarity and process, things moved faster and better. Today, we are scaling healthily. Our leadership has many capable ladies and men.
Business books can advice division of labour. That is an obvious implementation. I believe the secret to the black art of scaling though… is diversity. That is the sauce that makes division of labour work because you can find talent to perform tasks effectively. In that sauce is also trust. By giving people trust, they can ship quicker. The limitation of any micro-manager is that they can do everything themselves but their output is limited by their time and energy. They are also single points of failure, making their teams unsustainable in the long term as knowledge and connections are lost.
If you want to join an enlightened leadership team, you need to find leaders who learn how to trust and empower. By doing so, the leaders free themselves up to focus on immediate pressing issues and long term strategy. Learning to trust can be difficult. Finding methods to test people’s ability subtly is also challenging. A trick from Mr Goh Chok Tong, Singapore’s 2nd Prime Minister — getting team members to explain their strategy or way of doing something. By spotting contradictions or gaps as they argued for something towards the end, one can see if they have thought through their plan. Based on that, one can provide guidance and have a sense of how competent someone is. If they are convinced, then let them go ahead. Failure can be accepted. Risks just need to be mitigated. We train people after all.
Spotting typing errors is also another. I was trained stringently by my superior officers back in the Singapore Police Force. It’s how we can turn plans into action.
Another thing is developing training programs. What I did was to ensure capable and ambitious people were put in calls with me to understand how I conducted business. We also walked through scenarios with the team to learn negotiation techniques. Finally, when they were deemed worthy, these members could execute their plans. As Mr Goh said, ‘you don’t really learn from textbooks, you learn from being out there on the ground, and you make decisions based on what you see and hear and observe.’ This statement is true for any enterprise. Any training programme needs to prioritise sending people out into the field as soon as possible, to deliver value to the organisation.
The next component is bonding. Scalable teams means many leadership positions are created. Diversity is needed because it provides a larger talent pool. When we tap on someone’s shoulder, they respond and support the cause. the cause being — an environment that supports and nurtures an individual’s aspirations. This is important as the team cannot rely on people motivated by power. We were not looking for politician-types, because they are motivated with CV first, people second. That can be disastrous for a long term project. This can also create dictatorships that can subvert the interests of the project. We needed to find the right people and they are easy to spot, because they hustle hard for the team even without a formal position. Leaders need to be people who fight for their team. If they fight for them first, only then will their team follow.
Leadership needs to be motivated by duty because it is tiring work. It is a 7 days a week job. Everyday we think about how we can further our member’s goals. Money will not bring people purpose and bonding. We tried that by buying loads of food for christmas but not many people turned up. We improved when we spoke to them and listened. Our socials were changed based on feedback. People begin to feel that they owned part of the society and thought about our resources. We have food together each week and we talk.
The transformation has been quick. It is also noticeable. We began winning awards and getting mentioned on Forbes for our work. We were shipping on all fronts — code/articles/events.
The result of investing heavily in our people’s aspirations is that we record greater personnel growth. We become diverse. We make people believe in themselves to create things. Then we become Scalable.
Through trial and error, the biggest lesson I learnt in cultivating a startup culture is that Diversity is the engine for Growth and the answer to the Black Arts of scalability. My job leading the team is coming to an end, but I have deep confidence that the leaders after me armed with the system and values will continue to operate effectively.
Diversity and Scalability are inextricable engines of growth. Any team that wants to grow and win definitely needs to make it high on their agenda.
