Relationships & Skills

[Sam Gribben]

If you don't stay ahead of that People and Culture stuff, it's just always the hardest thing, you know. There are product things you can work out, if you've got problems with your people and they're not- and there's tension between them or people are unhappy, it has a huge impact on the company and it's not something you can just kind of roll up your sleeves and do an all-nighter and fix. You know, you have to- a lot of those problems if you let them go too far they take a lot long time to unwind, you know, if you make the wrong hire and you don't act on it quickly enough or um don't define people's roles quite enough. You know, it's all fine at the beginning, nice and kind of fast and loose and startupy, but you know, stay ahead of it because it matters to people. I think as time goes on that they're um being heard and listened to and that you're- the leadership is putting the effort into making sure that the company's really on point with those things.

[Aroha Armstrong]

Being a business owner and an entrepreneur and a business leader, especially in te ao Māori, can be a lonely journey. And people tend to battle away at it on their own and try and solve those problems alone. I think if there is a network of people that you are engaging with that are sharing the same problems, that gives you heart that you're not alone that those problems are common. It allows to help solve each other's problems, because someone will say 'oh yeah, I made that mistake 2 years ago and this is how we overcame it.'

[Sam Gribben]

Part of what we need to do as leaders is to push the team to do more than they think they're capable of. You know a lot of people put limitations on themselves that, as a leader, you can see don't exist, so you want to encourage people and put a good culture in place. I think that's something that gets talked about a lot but is um can't really be talked about enough, you know, can't really be overemphasised. You just got to really really take care of your people and make sure it's really fair and you're really staying ahead of the areas of People and Culture that you need to develop as the company grows.

[Angie Judge]

I think when anybody in life makes the transition from being a sole operator to leading a team, you sort of understand and get to this point within yourself, when you know that to go fast you go alone and to go far you need to go together. And funnily enough, I think all the skills that get us in life to that point of making that transition are the skills that have made us successful as an individual contributor. And we then have to spend the rest of our careers in pursuit of the right leadership skills that help us then lead a team to whatever outcome or achievements we're looking for.

[Adrian Packer]

So, one of the challenges we find in most businesses as they scale is the 'founder's mindset' we like to call. It evaporates as we bring in professional managers. So, there's an upskilling component to all businesses that can successfully, repeatedly innovate. And that's to train their entrepreneurial managers or to train their managers to be entrepreneurial.

If we're going to engage our manufacturers or our operations team or our supply chain team in the innovation process in order to mitigate the risks that will pop up as we scale our product, if we're going to include them in this process, then we need to think about how they deal with uncertainty, how they deal with risk, how they manage their time to dedicate sufficient time to that innovation process. So, these are skills that we need to have in our operational teams, in our management force. Of course, another thing that we need to be considering is how do they have the time to do this Innovation work. If they're uh fully occupied with the day-to-day working in the business, how do they find the time to work on the business and if so, we find one of the key capabilities that's required to build sustainable innovation practices is the ability to plan for innovation and to provide the capacity to do that innovation work. And all of this can be learned.

Businesses are structured in silos as we've talked about, right? And so, you can't innovate from out of a silo very easily, right? You have to bring more people within- a more cross functional team and ideally including people from outside of the organisation right. And when this is happening, we find that the existing structures with- that kind of hold the current way of working together need to be changed in some way, even in a small way, we need to be adjusting them, we need to be changing them. So, there's no organisation that I've that ever seen that doesn't have to tackle that in some way, right? Doesn't mean we all need to set up skunk works and external entities to do this work, but we do need to manage the change that's required for new.

[John Mansell]

Often in the early stages of a product development cycle, there's input from various parties, and some of those are- people who are employees or participants in the company. And sometimes, you're getting input from external providers, contractors or developers who, you as the principal, will be, you know, seeking input from. And it's really important at that point to understand the obligations that those other parties have in terms of transferring rights in their contributions through to you as the principal. So, making sure that you've got your engagement agreements in place and that they speak to the sorts of issues that are likely to arise in the course of the product development process that you're engaging in.

So, for example, you might be developing a product and it might involve some 3D modeling, it might involve mold making or casting, it might involve a whole lot of software generation. Each of those things may have different IP aspects to them, and they're handled in slightly different ways, and so you want to make sure that your commissioning agreements address the transfer of information and the transfer of ownership appropriately through. So that when you come to protect your product, and more, you know, often the case that arises where someone's looking at your product offering and thinking 'hey, do I really want to spend $3 million investing in this company? And do I know that they own all the stuff that they purport to own?', that's when all those issues can come to light. And so knowing that you have robust ownership of your product offering and all the underlying IP that facilitates it, is a really good thing to bear in mind as you you're starting out on that process. And that does two things, it gives you a degree comfort that you'll sleep at night, and it also gives you an ability to show investors or participants down the line, commercial partners, that you have all your ducks in a row, you understand the value of that, and you're building that asset for the for the value of the company.

I think it's important um particularly in product development where people are bringing, you know, a lot of- a lot of experience, a lot of insight, a lot of creativity to that, that those contributions aren't under-represented or under-valued. And so, realising that where you are creating you have a hand in the creative process, that you're, you know, valuing that contribution appropriately, you're not giving it away, you want to recognise the value that that embodies for your company or for your product or the product development process itself. That's a really important thing for people to hold in the forefront of their minds as they're going through this process. So, I'd counsel that we ought not be reluctant to have those agreements in place at a very early stage in the piece, because it's a good testing point to... interrogate, I guess, the willingness of all the parties to understand their respective positions. But it's also a good testing point to see what the relationship might be as it moves forward as well.