From HBR: What Makes a Successful Startup Team
The focus of the article is on startups, but the same lessons apply to enterprises as well. The successful teams have both hard (past experience etc.) and soft skills (passion, common goals etc.). The soft skills manifests in enterprises as alignment amongst various teams/levels and passion for common product goals.
What makes a successful startup team?
One common answer is that prior startup experience, product knowledge, and industry skills predict the success of a new venture. But is prior experience sufficient for a team to work well together? In a recent study of 95 new startup teams in the Netherlands, we explored that question.
We found that experience alone was not enough to make a team thrive. While experience broadens the teams’ resource pool, helps people identify opportunities, and is positively related to team effectiveness, a team also needs soft skills to truly thrive. Specifically, our study shows that shared entrepreneurial passion and shared strategic vision are required to get to superior team performance as rated by the external venture capital investors.