Motivating your core team

The Beermat Entrepreneur offered an intriguing strategy for assembling a competent and driven team.  He suggested to give each team member an equal stake in the company, which ran against my intuition of the founding entrepreneur retaining the largest share of the company.  However, this approach is consistent with other decentralization tactics I have come across.  Giving each cornerstone team member an equal stake gives them a huge incentive to offer everything they have to the company, and aligns their own self-interest with the success of the company. 

Decentralizing operations and allowing for each team member to execute an appropriate level of autonomy may be preferable than having the entrepreneur manage each team member too closely.  Ian from Thread appeared to have a solid understanding of his role within his team.  He hired team members with expertise in areas that he lacked, and deferred to their judgments.  He also allowed his team to argue endlessly in pursuit of a feasible solution, often refraining from entering the fray himself.  He also suggested that allowing his team to fail in order to understand the lessons more intimately was a critical tactic for developing understanding.  These goals may be costly in the short-term, but the overall objective of fostering a team that is both honest with their opinions, and trusting of one another would prove to be a hugely valuable asset in the long-term.  The entrepreneur must balance between micro-managing and anarchy, all while finding their appropriate niche in the larger team setting.

The entrepreneur must be aware of their own shortcomings, and must consequently rely on their team in areas where they are lacking.  If the entrepreneur has too much control over the company, they may resist important feedback from their team members, and lead the company down a unproductive path.  In short, the entrepreneur must retain the original vision of the company, yet their field of view is not large enough to encapsulate of the periphery.  Granting equal ownership to cornerstone team members will encourage the team to take their roles seriously and with initiative.