Hi, my name is Vincent and I’m a co-blogger on Tech IT Easy. Today, my topic is about people within an entrepreneurial context.

People make for an intriguing topic, partially because we all have opinions on what makes a good friend or partner, but we aren’t always able to translate it to practice. As someone who is a partial introvert, I’ve always liked to observe people around me and note things about them. And I like asking people what they think about things like people, and I like to read books about the subject, and I like to write about it. In the end, you build up a nice library of pseudo-science (which I define as a collection of anecdotes).

Is there such a thing as archetypes and (why) should we care?

Yes, I think there is. One of the oldest pseudo-sciences about people in human history, Astrology, classifies people into four main elements: air, water, earth, and fire, each saying something about the core-ego of that person. Most simply put, air-signs are strong socially; water-signs are creative; earth-signs are grounded; and fire-signs can burn you. No, just kidding, I’m fire, but they are passionate. If you don’t believe in Astrology, I recommend picking up a serious book about it and forgetting about the newspaper-”predictions.” Also understand that we all are actually have 12 star-signs or houses, describing different attitudes in different areas of life.

Less pseudo (perhaps), there is a bunch of literature on archetypes in teams, Jeremy and me even wrote an essay about it many years ago. In my opinion, or rather what I like best, is when three characteristics are present in teams: the social, the detailed, and the integrator. The social part is the one that makes the initial contacts (there are certain people that are great at that). The detailed person watches the bottom-line and makes for a great project-manager. And the integrator has the vision and closes the sale. Not necessarily three different people, but three archetypes or traits I consider important to getting things done. Opinions vary on this and are probably more scientific than mine.

You can also classify people by age, education, culture, gender, and other traits, which affect their ability to work together, as does, the size of the team. Educational and cultural diversity affect teams negatively, and studies have shown that teams larger than 9 don’t work as well.

I personally like the idea of 5 people in a team. It’s just small enough not to lose the overview, there’s (hopefully) some duplication of skills, it’s an uneven number during a vote, they all fit in a car, and you can call them the A-Team.

Should you care about archetypes? It’s very hard to build a good team, but what matters in the end is not that all archetypes are represented, but that team-members complement each other.

Teams and startups

In an entrepreneurial context, there’s a couple of contexts in which archetypes matter. One is the initial network, which you use to develop your idea. Part of that network may initially evolve into a board of directors and investors, that will also likely be on the board. Important here are at least two traits:

• Advisors (pre- and post-startups) should add valuable knowledge in a field relevant to the startup: this can be the industry, but also the underlying tech, as well as more practical matters like running the startup. They should also complement you.
• Advisors should be critical, but constructively so. I mean, you can hammer a guy to the ground, but at least do it for a good reason.

I’m sure there’s a hidden rule somewhere that advisors should also be investors as well—put your money where your mouth is.

The other area where teams matter is of course the development of the company. We talked about the e-myth several times on this blog already, and it’s a pretty formative part of my thinking about teams: there are those that manage and there are those that execute, and each role should be clearly defined, even if the management and the execution is done by that same person.

It’s kind of why I believe in area-champions, by which I mean people that are responsible for a certain area in the company. In a software-development-company, you’d need a chief architect to be responsible for the tech part of things. You’ll also need other champions for the marketing and sales function(s), for the operational and financial side of things, etc., etc. Here, archetypes matter and are both defined by personality, as well as experience and skill-set.

I should add that, while I asked about the relevance of process-coding before, I don’t actually believe that you should have to spell out every task for a person, unless that person works in a McDonalds-kitchen or you’re writing a franchisees manual.

In conclusion: Your value matters most

People are building blocks, just like anything else in life, but the one thing I learned from people like my father and other networkers that I respect, is that you don’t get help by treating people as simple building blocks.

If you are a good person and treat people in a fair manner, if you are smart and add value to other people’s lives, then people will automatically come to you. If you’re none of these things, you can still hand out 100s of business-cards, spam your name a 1000 times through social networks, blogs, and other means, you’ll still not be successful. Because you forgot the essential lesson, that a network is only as strong as its individual nodes. And that networks are self-selecting.

Vincent out

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