You can tell whether a team is good or not just by looking at this one single point.

Content Source: CAS Star | Key highlights from the Hard Tech Champion Enterprise Entrepreneurship Camp course. The content is released with the review and authorization of the organizer and the speaker.

Sharing Guest: Li Hao, Founding Partner of CAS Star.

Many companies fail to survive, often not because of their products, but their organizations.

Conflicts between partners, cliques formed by senior executives, and new outstanding talents who see the complicated relationship network and want to quit on the first day. These problems often occur when the company gets slightly better — after resources are accumulated, divergences on development directions emerge, and eventually the corporate culture is corrupted.

Li Hao, Founding Partner of CAS Star, believes that complicated relationships are the enemy of a genuine senior management team. Trust is not that mysterious, it means predictable behavior. When looking for partners, follow the standard of "one shared aspiration, two common principles, three complementary traits".

He also said that the core criterion for judging a good team is whether it can win battles continuously.

If you are building a team, leading a group of people, or feel more exhausted as your company grows, this article is worth 10 minutes of your time.

I. The Unavoidable First Step for Founders: Building the Core Team

1. Complicated relationships are the enemy of a genuine senior management team

A genuine senior management team has several characteristics: sound organization building, united core members, strategic consensus, and shared cultural identity.

The two most critical elements are the top leader and external adaptability.

What is the purpose of a team gathering together? To win battles. The only way to judge whether a team is good is to see if it can win continuously. A team that can keep winning is a good team, and the one that cannot is a source of trouble.

The most fearful situation is a self-indulgent senior management team: members get along very well with each other and provide emotional support for one another, but cannot deliver results in actual business. If you keep losing battles while feeling good about yourselves, you need to reflect on this seriously.

Complicated relationships are the enemy of a genuine senior management team. When you start a business, your first partner may be your spouse, the second may be your college or PhD classmate, and some others may be your relatives or childhood friends. This seems like a perfect combination at the beginning, but as the enterprise grows, complicated relationships will emerge in the genuine senior management team.

When a new outstanding senior executive joins your team, he finds that two of the members are classmates, and some others are relatives, and he has no such close relationship with anyone in the team. He will find it impossible to integrate and want to leave on the first day.

2. What is trust: Predictable behavior

How can you win the trust of most people in a company? You need to have clear principles and logic that are understood and recognized by everyone, then you will gain the trust of all members.

Let me interpret trust for you. When a word cannot be broken down into smaller units, it represents the minimum granularity of your current cognition. If the word can be split into smaller units, you can get a more precise understanding. The smaller granularity you can decompose a concept into, the deeper your cognition is.

What can trust be broken down into? Predictable behavior. That is, I can predict and judge what you will do and what you will not do. It often takes more than a decade to build trust, but it only takes one second to break it. If you do something that violates the shared expectation, the trust will collapse instantly.

Therefore, as senior executives and founders, you must keep your emotions stable in the company and win the trust of all members. If you cannot even do this well and lead the team properly, there is no need to talk about those more advanced management theories.

3. Selecting partners: One shared aspiration, two common principles, three complementary traits

There is no standard answer to whether you need to find partners, which is related to your self-awareness. How do you view yourself and the business you are running? If you think you can handle everything well, that's fine, you can do it all by yourself. If you realize that you cannot make it alone, then you need partners.

You need to know clearly what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, what you are good at, and what you are not good at. If you think you can handle everything, you do not need partners, and you cannot cooperate well with others even if you find some.

In our investment practice, we have communicated with, met, and cooperated with many enterprises, and found that one of the most important reasons why many enterprises cannot continue to develop is the various conflicts between partners.

When do conflicts happen?

They do not happen when the enterprise is getting worse, but when the enterprise is developing slightly better. Simply put, after new resources are obtained and new directions can be explored, you want to go east while he wants to go west. At the beginning, you may still discuss, but later you find that no one can convince the other, then you will ask senior executives to take sides, middle managers to take sides, and even shareholders to take sides.

The two sides start to pick faults on each other, report and expose each other's mistakes, and the corporate culture starts to deteriorate from this moment.

My partner Mi Lei (Founding Partner of CAS Star) and I co-founded CAS Star 13 years ago. Many LPs often ask us: What will you do if the two of you have conflicts? There seems to be no standard answer to this question. What is the actual answer?

First, we both understand that making the enterprise better is more important than our own interests.

Second, we both deeply realize that the other's position is irreplaceable. If we drive the other person away, the impact and loss on me will be huge.

Third, you need to learn communication skills. The two of us have different opinions on many issues, but our solution is to discuss things that will happen 3 to 5 years later.

When looking for partners, we have a summary called "one shared aspiration, two common principles, three complementary traits".

One shared aspiration means the same original intention; two common principles mean shared values and consistent long-term goals; three complementary traits mean complementary capabilities, resources and personalities. Mi Lei and I are exactly like this. You can imagine that one of us has a lame left leg and the other has a lame right leg, so we cooperate very well when we walk together.

Partners and senior executives have different definitions. We share the same route and vision, and we work together to do the same business. If the things you want to do or the pursuits in your heart are no longer the same, you are no longer in a partnership. Does distributing equity to someone mean he is your partner?

A partner must hold equity, but someone who holds equity is not necessarily a partner. A partner must have entrepreneurship and an entrepreneurial mindset. All of you are adults, with a rational, non-emotional, and fully dedicated attitude.

4. Your pattern determines what kind of people you can gather

Pattern refers to the pattern and space of life, a person's cognition of the position of things and their future changes, which is the internal layout of a person's vision, mind and courage. Pattern is directly related to one thing: how big your ambition is and how big business you want to do.

If your ambition is big enough, so big that no one can put forward a bigger ambition than you, they will have no choice but to work with you. The circle you draw is the largest, and whatever they draw is within your subset, then they will choose to cooperate with you.

If you set a very small ambition and a very small vision, and others want to do bigger things than you, do you think they will come to work for you? Deep down they will think you are not on the same level as them, that's the truth.

The distribution of interests is also within the scope of your pattern. There is such a rule in the world: all greedy people will spit out what they have taken by improper means in the end. When your contribution does not match the reward you get, this result will happen.

5. Endow work with meaning: The story of Mutton Pita Bread Soaked in Lamb Soup

Do not expect that distributing equity will make everyone have a sense of ownership, do not have too high expectation on this. The whole process of distribution and interest binding is a complex systematic project, which is related to assessment, promotion mechanism, distribution mechanism, and how to distribute after-tax profits, it is a comprehensive system.

But on the other side of the coin: if you distribute the equity properly, you will be the biggest beneficiary. You can feel the stable and continuous improvement and progress of the company, which does not come from a single person, but from a mysterious collective power of the team.

You will find that bad people and bad things in this team disappear automatically, because 80% of the people in the company hold equity, if you do something harmful to the interests of the company, you are making enemies of 80% of the people.

Why do Huawei's employees have such a strong fighting spirit? Because most of them believe their work, their struggle, and their dedication are meaningful. If an enterprise has a common goal and pursues this goal unremittingly, it endows employees with meaning of work and life.

One of the most important tasks of human resource management is to make employees' work and life meaningful, so as to mobilize their enthusiasm fundamentally.

CAS Star also has a company in Xi'an. When many partners come to visit and communicate, I will take them to eat Mutton Pita Bread Soaked in Lamb Soup. Most people are not used to eating it, so you need to tell them a story about it.

The story dates back to the Qin Dynasty. In the cold weapon era, logistics was the most important for wars. If 10,000 soldiers fought on the front line, nearly 100,000 people were needed to transport food on the rear. Because the food transporters needed to eat on the way to the front, and also needed to carry food for the return trip, the cost of food transportation was extremely high.

Why was the Qin Dynasty able to unify the other six states? Because the Qin Dynasty solved the food problem. It is said that the Qin Dynasty invented Mutton Pita Bread Soaked in Lamb Soup: when the army set off, they brought live sheep, and when they arrived at the battlefield, they slaughtered the sheep. The crispy flatbread was made in advance, which could be stored for 10 to 15 days without going bad. Then they broke the flatbread into pieces and soaked it in boiled mutton soup. The food contains protein, sugar, meat and soup, which can make people feel full for a very long time, ensuring that soldiers can come back after fighting for at least 8 hours.

After you tell this story, they will find the Mutton Pita Bread Soaked in Lamb Soup extremely delicious. This is endowing the food with meaning. The food carries special meaning, and connects with the history more than 2000 years ago.

All of you are entrepreneurs. You need to make your employees feel that their work is meaningful after joining the enterprise, and connect their work with serving the country through science and technology and revitalizing the industry. When work is meaningful, their work motivation and engagement will be completely different. If you cannot achieve this, you are not a qualified founder.

II. Three Core Tasks for Founders: Recruiting People, Raising Capital, and Defining Direction

1. Recruiting people: Do not make do with mediocre candidates

How to govern a company? Can you build a sound system covering the shareholders' meeting, the board of directors, the company's management team structure, rules, culture, incentives, equity, clear rewards and penalties, post setting, and talent echelon? It sounds complicated, but it is actually not that difficult to implement.

A good company only needs to focus on three things: recruiting people, raising capital, and defining direction. Recruit as few people as possible, and make sure everything matches. Recruit people with strong capabilities, spend more money to hire better talents, and never make do with mediocre candidates.

From the start of your business to the recruitment of the first 10 employees, you need to think clearly whether you are using people to get things done or just doing small business. Set high standards for the first 10 employees and never make do with mediocre people, the more you compromise, the worse the quality of your team will be. You need to find self-driven talents, and spend more money to hire stronger people.

2. Raising capital: The essence of financing

The essence of financing is the in-depth thinking of entrepreneurs on their business, and the cognition coverage of investment institutions. If you think deeper about your track than the investment institutions, you will get the capital. If you think not as deep as them and get stuck by their questions, you cannot get the financing.

Financing is a process of calculating accounts, which is an important factor in entrepreneurship, and even a decisive factor. You need to clarify two questions: what is the ceiling of your business, and what is the probability of success. The process for investors to build trust in you is essentially judging these two questions.

When raising capital, you need to find a professional FA (Financial Advisor), do not be reluctant to spend some money on it, it is very useful. Just like you will not buy a house without an agent, financing is the same, it is a kind of standardized service.

Nowadays, many enterprises cannot get financing only by telling a good business story, they need a complete logical system, and you need to make sure your story can justify your valuation. VCs will ask you many questions during the financing process. You also need to think clearly: what kind of capital do you want? What kind of capital do you reject? This is a very important thing for you.

3. Defining direction: Strategy is trade-off

Strategy is not positioning. Strategy means you find what you need to do to have a future, what you need to give up, what arrangements you need to make, and what layouts you need to carry out for this strategy. We often discuss the 3-year, 5-year and 10-year strategy of our own company, how to view the market, and how to view the industry.

Zeng Ming once said that strategy has eight words: The more you give up, the more you gain; the bigger you bet, the bigger you win. "The more you give up, the more you gain" means how much you are willing to abandon for this goal, the bigger the abandonment, the bigger the possible gain; "the bigger you bet, the bigger