One of my favorite insights about scaling organizations is from Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn. In Masters of Scale, Episode 21, guest host Tim Ferriss highlights The Ten Commandments of Startup Success. The fifth commandment is related to speed. Here’s advice Reid shared with his former chief of staff:
“If you move quickly, there’ll be mistakes borne of haste. If you’re a manager and care seriously about speed, you’ll need to tell your people you’re willing to accept the tradeoffs. Reid did this with me. We agreed I was going to make judgment calls on a range of issues on his behalf without checking with him. He told me, ‘In order to move fast, I expect you’ll make some foot faults. I’m okay with an error rate of 10-20% — times when I would have made a different decision in a given situation – if it means you can move fast.’”
In the interview Tim Ferriss explains that a foot fault is an expression in tennis: if the player serves and their foot goes over a line, that’s a foot fault. They are errors. Reid empowered his team by allowing a percentage of qualified errors in exchange for speed and growth.
I’ll take what he’s having, please.
Speed is a strength for growing agile businesses. Established companies might be more stable, but often they are less nimble. The speed of a startup is the speed of its founder. The owner sets the pace and determines (unknowingly or not) if the organization will leverage speed or throttle it. Sometimes entrepreneurs control speed unknowingly — they slow down their teams through fear of failure, desire for perfection or by choosing short-term influence over long-term success (founder’s syndrome). As leaders, we should look for ways to open the sails and increase the speed of our businesses and teams.
To create speed in your organization and on your teams:
- Empower your team to make good decisions, fail fast
- Share learnings across all teams to fail fast together
- Document processes to replicate success
- Instead of thinking about more things to do, consider what you don’t want to do; identify someone else to manage it
How do you create speed in your organization and manage agile teams?