How to Find and Build Fantastic Teams

Working in a fantastic team, such as the one here at Clarvo, is an incredible privilege. Many people never get to experience it at all; I've never heard of a school project with equal contribution and many an afterwork is spent complaining about office politics.

Sometimes, it can feel like rebuilding all of civilization alone from scratch would be easier than assembling and maintaining a group of similarly committed people working together towards a common goal in harmonious collaboration - and yet, it isn't. With a great team, it almost doesn't matter what you start out doing, because you can always pivot and figure it out. A fantastic team is the greatest asset and selling point of any small startup, project or organization, whereas a bad team, often only held together by a vague idea, a bunch of duct tape and heaps of hope, can become a liability, draining the enthusiasm of everyone involved while also failing to deliver what it set out to do on a level everybody is satisfied about.

So, what makes a team great and how can you ever hope to find yourself in such rare and precious a circumstance?

This is the central question that I was contemplating about right before joining Clarvo, after just icing my previous startup due to different ambition levels between us founders. In fact, I would cite getting the chance to essentially consider this very question for a job in the most concrete way possible through building recommendation algorithms to help others build and join great teams as the main reason for why I originally joined, while the team is why I stayed.

I am still learning about how to reliably reproduce the creation and coming across of great teams, but have now experienced sufficiently many successes and failures that I can confidently identify and explain certain patterns that go into making great teams.

Characteristics of Great Teams

Great teams are characterized by alignment and complementarity, which ultimately lead to synergy. You must match in levels of ambition, be compatible in communication style, and share the ultimate vision. Everyone must have a clear, unique role and contribution to the team that all other members equally acknowledge and appreciate, preferably out loud and often.

Much of what ties a team together in my experience is the uniformity of perception about mutual momentum. It is not enough that the team makes progress in their project and everyone contributes equally - everyone must actively feel this on a daily basis. Nothing kills momentum faster than anybody getting the feeling of anyone else freeloading. You need to be able to trust that the others get their hands dirty with you and reliably deliver on their area of responsibility and communicate about their failure to do so in a direct and timely manner when unforeseen complications inevitably arise.

Everybody in the team should constantly strive to improve to the extent that there is no choice but for everyone to do so if they wish to keep up. The goldilocks zone is where everyone equally has a bit of impostor syndrome about belonging to the team, but use that as fuel to improve and inspire others to do the same. Therefore, it goes without saying that general competence and complimentary skillsets are very important as well.

The common goal you aim to achieve should be clear and one that each and every one of you can personally and independently, fully stand behind without hesitation. Make no compromises. Disagreements are inevitable and even desirable, for you must feel comfortable to challenge and be challenged on which paths are better than others, but debate, validation and sometimes unreserved trial and error should eventually converge on the right path.

Any idea you decide to carry out should be implemented to the extent that its original proponent is willing to take full responsibility for it, meaning that you should trust each others' instincts and vision to honestly validate them to their fullest extent, even if you do not see their genius immediately. If it turns out to misfire, a great team quickly cuts their losses, recalibrates and reprioritizes without assigning blame and proceeds with the next idea, working with whatever resources and time they have.

Finding and Building Great Teams

Great teams are composed of great individuals with great chemistry. Exceptional people are rare to come by and potentially difficult to combine together into a cohesive group, due to strong personalities and diverging visions, making exceptional teams near legendary in rarity. In truth, some luck may also be necessary, but here are some tried and tested strategies to maximize the odds:

1. Become a Person Who People Want to Collaborate With

   Chase your interests unapologetically and share your journey freely. Build a portfolio of projects, be it pieces of software, boards of hardware, blog posts, podcasts, paintings or pictures of events, art installations or portraits, that you can show people to demonstrate what you are capable of and where your interests lie.

   Documenting your personal learnings on the way is a fantastic way to develop your expertise, as well as others' perceptions of it. No need to become a social media influencer, but the more people you have helped or inspired, the more people want to collaborate with you. This can be done in mass via social media, if you have something interesting to say, or in person, which is often far more memorable and meaningful.

   Make sure to invest in acquiring concrete, demonstrable, hard skills. Ideas people are a dime a dozen, while those with deep domain expertise and experience to back it up, even if from personal side projects alone, are rare and highly sought after. Having already built something undeniably awesome once before frees you from having to justify your presence in any team where that knowhow is beneficial. That being said, do not forget to work on your communication and collaboration skills either, because those determine the atmosphere and effectiveness of the team after you are on it.

2. Be Proactive

   We have all had at least one of the fantasies of prince charming, the manic pixie dream girl, the men in black, the mysterious traveler, or the wise old mentor showing up randomly at our door on a Tuesday afternoon and taking us on a great adventure. In reality, however, that never happens, and we must step out of that door to seek out those mentors and explorers by ourselves.

   You must actively put yourself in places with other ambitious people, who often tend to cluster around the centers of greatest densities of opportunity. This can mean different things depending on your goals and context; for some it might mean moving cities or even countries, while the lucky ones may find the opportunities closer at work, school or hobbies. Pick them carefully.

   Once you are in a good school or company, attend every extracurricular activity you can find at least once in order to determine what the people interesting to you do, where they go and why. Explore every club, society and event, and if you feel like something is missing, found it yourself. Also check out Luma and other event aggregators - many cities have their own - to see what else is going on in your city.

   Often, many of the events by the various clubs and societies are at least semi-open to people genuinely interested in the ecosystems, even if they do not belong to the institutions under which they operate, so don't be afraid to show up as an outsider. If you have no particular agenda, you can also go volunteer at events relevant to your aspirations to 1. keep them going, 2. meet likeminded people at similar stages of their journey, as well as those who are much further and 3. see how you work with them and who you are most impressed by as potential team members in the future.

   You can also find communities who talk about your topics of interest, either directly or tangentially and go see what they have to say. Challenge them and provide your input, even if you have only recently started learning about the topic. People love to talk about their passions and your questions can provide healthy grounding for those who need to remember how they began in the first place. Engage actively in communities you find valuable, preferably offline, but online can work as well, as long as you do it in a goal-oriented manner.

3. Talk to Everybody

   You never know who is going to be the perfect co-founder, collaborator or co-conspirator until you talk with them and discover that they too have been bothered by the same things that you have. Many people with builder's mindset do not share these frustrations publicly until they are ready to do something about them. Bonding over these can be very powerful, but you cannot find them unless you ask and expose your own.

   People in these kinds of environments are usually there for a reason and often building their own side projects regardless of their current role. They might also tell you about other opportunities that you would not and could not find in any other way, especially if you ask. You can learn something from anyone, whether it is confirmation or challenge for your intuitions and observations or the first step towards a long-lasting mentorship sparked by a unique question not many could successfully answer. Finally, they may know other people that you might be interested in talking to and the mere act of growing your network itself can bring valuable benefits in the future via the strength of weak ties, which implies that a person's weakest connections are often the most helpful for their career advancement.

4. Be Open About Your Ideas and Direct About Alignment

   Remember that practically all ideas are worthless without execution and the likelihood of you discovering a truly novel and thoroughly original one is essentially zero. Therefore, as long as you have followed point 1 of becoming a person people want to collaborate with, you should not be afraid of people stealing your ideas, as they will rather be enthusiastic about having found somebody to work with if they think it worth pursuing.

   The opposite is far more likely to be true, where you will struggle to find collaborators. Thus, it is in your interest to pitch your ideas to as many people and as often as possible to gather feedback on whether it makes sense in the first place and to find others who might be interested in them. Even when you have utilized your weak ties to get the word out there that you are interested in a certain idea, it can take a lot longer to find somebody willing to chase it with you than you think.

   Even if somebody did genuinely steal the idea, who would you bet on executing it better: the hostile copycat pushing away productive collaboration opportunities or the person who has been intimately invested in the idea and now has both validation for it, as well as the motivation to compete with all they have got? Competition is always good, as it forces you to sharpen your thinking, gives you a reference point to learn from and forces you to reach further, faster.

   When people express interest and want to either join your team or invite you to join theirs, state clearly what you plan to bring and what you expect of the others in return. Establishing expectations in the very beginning regarding roles, goals, contributions, communication and overall intensity helps you align from the first moment onwards and gives you a reference point to look back on when discussing changes to any aspect.

   Remember that you must align in all of the dimensions, not only in one or two. If you agree on the idea with somebody but they don't match your desired intensity or complement your skills, you're doing a disservice to both parties. Again, remember that the quality of the team, which largely arises from your mutually shared perception of it coupled with the results you manage to deliver, is all that matters, not the ideas. So, don't be afraid of carefully curating the people on the team.

5. Trial by Fire

   The best way, by far, to see how you operate as a team is to try it in a high-pressure environment. Go to a hackathon together and build something to see how you collaborate under time pressure, or arrange one for yourself by imposing artificial limits and creating the very first super bare bones minimum viable product over the weekend. Code is easy, but this can be applied to anything else too from conducting a minimal experiment or composing a song to planning and arranging a micro-scale event. Make sure you know first-hand what it is like to work with the people you are building a team with.

   This can, of course, be done by jumping into the project directly too, but people might be hesitant to give their all without knowing what to expect. In this case, you have to take the lead and set the pace. If, however, the others do not soon join the effort, you must cut your losses early and leave quickly to find those who will. To avoid this, I recommend you start immediately with something short but intense.

   Try-outs are a great method for growing an already established team, but the key to observing how a new member might complement the team is to make it casual. Ideally, the person being recruited would not even be fully conscious of the fact. If you're a startup looking to hire somebody who looks great on paper, bring them to work at the office for a day as a consultant and pay them for their time accordingly while secretly evaluating whether they would fit in the team or not in terms of their working and communication style. If you're a band looking for a new player, invite them to join a casual jam.

   Only if you are still impressed afterwards, invite them to discuss terms for joining more permanently. This way, the party trying out will not feel too stressed about it, giving a more authentic performance, and you will not feel the pressure to accept them out of obligation or compassion, unless they really are good, as there were no promises made.

6. Commit

   Once you have a great team assembled and everything is working smoothly, commit to it fully and give every member some stake in achieving the goal. This allows for maximum focus on the goal, while also creating a healthy atmosphere of mutual trust and striving for improvement. Adopt a growth mindset and don't let individual failures and setbacks shake that feeling. Of course, there may come points in time when the team becomes misaligned, sometimes to a degree where its continuation must be re-evaluated, but these should often be recoverable by returning back to the original goals and expectations, hence why point 4 of being open about your ideas and direct about alignment in the very beginning is so vitally important.

A great team is composed of great, well-aligned individuals with good chemistry and complementary skills and attitudes who each actively both feel and contribute to the mutual momentum in the team. In order to find and build such fantastic teams, you must first become a person who people want to collaborate with and then be proactive about finding other similar people. Talk to everybody and be open about your ideas while stating your expectations directly. Make sure you know first hand what it is like to work with the people you are building a team with and once you are satisfied with the assembly, commit to it fully. Best of luck finding your dream team!