We’re living in the upside down these days. Reductions in force continue to snowball, 26+ million unemployed across the country…and the market has been going up? What? When reality seems to dislocate from common sense, it is important to come back to some ground truths as we seek to survey the landscape ahead with our teams.

One trope that has always been somewhat at odds with reality in startup land is to refer to a company’s employee base as a family. “Welcome to the Breakout Company family” they say. Company and family in the same sentence are sort of dislocated in their own way. Treating employees in a familial way? Sure. But there’s a major reason why no company will ever quite be a family.

You can’t fire your family members.

Or give them performance reviews, for the most part. Even as much as you’d like to after an awkward Thanksgiving political discussion or an over served Christmas dinner. Regardless of the plotted point on an economic cyclicality chart, they’re still your family through boom and bust.

Joining and playing for a team is a more apt and similarly used comparison. Everyone on a team has a role to play in service to a greater objective or mission. When the means to service that mission change (hello COVID), so will the makeup of the team. And as any successful team will tell you, the team always comes first.

Against the backdrop of arguably the greatest cultural workplace shift in modern history, teams and companies are shifting course. Quite literally. A temporary physical shift at the very least.

Bill Walsh, the late and former GM & Head Coach of the San Francisco 49ers, co-wrote a book called The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership. It’s a great read on management philosophy with direct application for leaders in tech much more than a book about football.

The key practice he taught was the implementation and ongoing work needed to achieve a high standard of performance in service against an ultimate objective – winning a Super Bowl. His secret was a borderline maniacal focus on the team inputs to drive success.

In an upside down world where common sense has been thrown out the window alongside yearly forecasts, the only way to focus on achieving team objectives might be through building a team that competes and completes the inputs in front of them.

What can you do to help your team?

In many ways, start from scratch. Experiment by pulling the role definition of your team members apart into a series of inputs that they can control unrelated to how macroeconomics might influence outcomes. An example:

Hypothetical Role Description: Manage a portfolio of clients, onboard customers, help them define their strategy and collaborate cross functionally

Hypothetical Inputs:

• Manage a portfolio of clients
  • Hold weekly calls with all enterprise customers
  • Hold bi-weekly calls with all SMB customers
• Onboard customers
  • Successfully onboard 100% of signed customers within 14 days
  • Track customer journey, engagement, and complete 3 touch points over the first 90 days
• Help them define their strategy
  • Share vertical specific product marketing content with all customers quarterly
  • Share quarterly product roadmap updates with all clients every 90 days
• Collaborate cross functionally
  • Schedule internal enterprise customer strategy sessions with functional stakeholders weekly
  • Schedule internal SMB customer strategy sessions with functional stakeholders bi-weekly

In all this nutso-ness, focusing on measurable inputs might be the only way to track progress, stay sane, and keep a team moving forward. One activity at a time, out front, and trackable for all to see.