As a leader or founding member of any project or startup, it is necessary to surround yourself by people talented in their areas of contribution. However, it is indispensable that everyone of them, and you, operate as a single mind capable of carrying on the CoDePPFP regardless of what life throws at you. Without such a team attitude, your great idea and smart individuals would be just that, ideas and individuals, instead of something greater than the sum of its parts.
A very entertaining and delightfully sad example of a group of talented individuals who squandered their opportunity to be successful because they couldn’t even resemble the definition of a team is portrayed in Roddy Doyle’s novel The Commitments.
The Commitments is a tale about a group of unemployed young people in the north side of Dublin, Ireland, who start a soul band. If you are a movie fan, you might have seen the very popular film by the same title and if you haven’t seen it yet and are leading a startup, consider watching it as a What Not to Do lesson while enjoying a great flick with moving music (check out the clip at the end of the post.)
There are many symptoms that tell you if you don’t have a team, just a bunch of talents. One of them is what I call the Three-Headed-Dragon. This symptom occurs when the development team (middle head) complains that it’s being pulled into two opposite directions, product (left head) and services (right head). Simply put, this means that your company hasn’t identified if it is a professional services company with focus on doing whatever a client needs or if it sells a product and provides the necessary support to the many clients who bought the pre-packaged versions of your product. 
New product startups sometimes get caught in professional services because a client is dangling immediate revenues in front of them. A fatal decision is when and why they say yes to that client. If the yes demands their development team to digress from the long-term goals, they’ll never get that precious time back and would probably fall under a vicious cycle of the right and left heads fighting for limited resources. To prevent this symptom from becoming a disease, the leader must bring together only those capable of committing to the success of the company as a whole and eliminate whatever creates the separate heads. Having a bunch of very talented people never does the trick if, like in The Comittments, they don’t understand the critical role that being a team plays in being successful.
Update: Sometimes, sadly, it is the leader who creates the separate heads and if that is the case, this is no longer a symptom, but a terminal disease…
Worth your 2:42 minutes, PROMISE:
