What makes a certain management team effective and another ineffective?
While there are multiple reasons for this, one of the biggest factor is the rhytm that goes on within a group.
What do I mean by this?
We cannot go into group effectiveness without first looking at individual effectiveness. After all, a group is only the combination of different individuals.
I have come to believe that every one of us is born and develops an internal clock of effectiveness.
Every one of us has a different understanding of what it means to be effective.
For example, at a factory, one individual can be pleased with producing 50 widgets, while another individual can be pleased with producing 100 widgets.
When the first individual produces 75 widgets then he goes home with a smile on his face. In contrast, when the second individual produces 75 widgets he goes home disappointed.
These standards and expectations become exponentially more complex when taken into an amorphous environment such as a startup.
After all, who the hell knows what is "good progress" and what is "bad progress"?
This is especially in the example of a startup that is pivoting and has not yet crystallized its value proposition.
In the case of startups, effectiveness can only be measured on a sliding scale. In other words, you only know what it means to be effective today by seeing the results of yesterday's work.
While the "outcome" of effectiveness constantly changes for a startup the input and energy consumed levels stay constant within individuals.
A simple analogy might be a construction worker whose job is to clear areas following riots. While he might not know what type of object he will have to move, he will naturally adapt a level of exertion that he believes he is both capable and pleased with at the end of the day.
Here is where it gets very interesting...
Assuming that you have two management team individuals who have very high standards. When you put two individuals of high caliber you can start to see non-linear improvements. In other words, the team of two (when leveraging technology effectively) can sometimes product 10-20x the amount of an average individual.
Unfortunately there is a converse example that is as drastic. Assume that you now bring in a third individual with average effectiveness.
What happens to the effectiveness? In many cases, it can drop to phenomenally low levels. The reason for this is both quantitative and qualitative.
On a quantitative level: unless tasks are constructed in a very clever way, the third individual becomes the bottle neck in the process. The effect that this has is that the effectiveness of EACH individual drops to the third individual's level.
In the above example, the 10-20x effectiveness would drop closer to 1x effectiveness and castrate the effectiveness of the two top performers (Yes, it's that bad).
On a qualitative level the results are even worse. What happens is that because of the individual's significantly lower standards, the other two individuals can start to have new believes and systems of standard creep into their subconscious. This process often begins to go into effect slowly. One evening, instead of staying home and working, they might go out to dinner and have some beer.
But it soon starts to have unbelievably negative repercussions.
This is the explanation to why management teams (of even 5+ employees) sometimes triple or quadruple productivity when a "bad apple" is let go.
As you know, I'm not here to dictate values. I'm not saying working in the evening is better than going out to eat dinner and drinking. People have different values and I respect that. It is indeed these differences in values that lead to these differences in effectiveness. After all the third individual is not necessarily "anti-work" he just might be more "pro-drinking".
The point is to give awareness and to illuminate these issue so that people can make a conscious choice on their values and effectiveness.
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