The functional medicine of business
How generalists get to the root causes of problems at startups
Over the past decade of working in early-stage, high-growth environments, I’ve been struck by the similarities between the startup and the human body. Just like the groups of cells in our bodies, businesses and organizations can also experience dis-ease. Manifesting as discomfort, pain, confusion and malaise, symptoms of an unwell organization can feel like work is, well–“work.”
Yet, most of us are fortunate enough to know what health really feels like. Synergy, inspiration, creativity and productivity are driving new connections and ideas. Systems and processes go unnoticed because they’re working seamlessly in the background. Information is flowing, energy fuels building, and the body is balanced and clear–capable of engaging with both opportunities and challenges with ease, curiosity and dare I say, joy!
Growing pains are a good sign of forward progress, but we’re also just getting to know ourselves as an organization. It can be hard to know the difference between true dis-ease and growing pains. How concerning is this issue or pattern? Will it go away with time, or will it continue to grow in the wrong direction?
how DO you ensure growing pains lead to successful execution and not dis-ease?
Supercharge your organization by fostering an environment of curiosity and support
Why This Works
Malignant or benign, all problems hold invaluable insight into where information, creativity and resources are not only blocked but are untapped and readily available! In fact, early-stage growing pains, when addressed with curiosity and support, can supercharge an organization’s success from the start, ensuring that growth is truly a one-way highway.
Every time I go into the darkness, I return with fistfuls of jewels. - Barbara McAffee
Why Do This Now
Similar to Gabor Mate’s explanation of the link between stress and illness in his latest book The Myth of Normal, Functional Medicine suggests that health and coherence within cells are naturally occurring, meaning that when we are ill, we don’t “have sickness,” we are actually just blocked from health. Generalists recognize exactly this. By tracking and transforming pain points, generalists remove blockers to stability, flow, and productivity within the organization. Energy that is no longer trapped will naturally return to multiply productivity, alignment and growth.
You may notice that generalists tend to embrace chaos, run toward problems instead of away from them, or have incredible patience with conflict, confusion and adversity. In fact, the best solutions often require complete immersion into a team, product, or initiative itself. A generalist certainly isn’t a one-size-fits-all individual and is a role that requires creativity, technical skills, business acumen, intuition and teamwork. Once aligned, however, proper generalist support in any organization achieves a healthy balance of action and awareness, fostering healthy, steady and enjoyable growth.
how We Do: Build for sustainable growth by focusing on the vision, mission, strategy, and tactics
If a generalist is splitting their time as part team member, part forensic scientist and part consultant, how do they make a measurable impact on the whole?
There are three core levels of healthy execution within any team, product or initiative that generalists are tracking to ensure we are always building and reinforcing a foundation that can be relied on. These three levels are:
Vision & Mission
Strategy
Tactics
Every organization requires a different set of skills to balance them. Below we break down each core level and the kind of generalist that supports it.
1. Vision & Mission
Rules (Process) 📝
Healthy State: Aligned and Creative
This may be the single most challenging part of running a healthy team–staying aligned. Sticking to a Mission doesn’t just mean posting it on your website and launching a blog or writing influential content on the topic. It means aligning your attention, decisions and actions each day to ensure that you as the leader have time and space to form and grow a thoughtful relationship with the problem you’re solving and why you’re solving it. This requires reflection, perspective, critical thinking, flexibility, intuition, creativity and resources–AKA space. If you’re too busy solving the problem, you may forget to listen to it.
Dis-eased State: Inefficient and Confused
In an organization lacking focused and creative leadership, misalignment tends to trickle down. Valuable energy and resources are misguided and wasted on inefficient or incongruent priorities. A founder can be too involved in strategy & tactics, losing sight of the strategic roadmap ahead. Once they poke their head out of the workshop, they realize it’s been a penny-wise, pound-foolish strategy, and their team has deviated from the course.
People 🫶
How Generalists Support This
Vision, direction and delegation are arguably a founder’s only responsibilities. As immersed team members, generalists can consistently attune to a team’s health and direction so leadership can stay focused on forging a road ahead. A generalist can multiply the impact of your initiatives by organizing high-level strategies and designing, implementing and tracking them while keeping heads clear, receptive and available to key problem sets.
Tools 🛠️
Tools don’t have to be tech! Some reliable frameworks for health at the Vision & Mission level are:
Define your Mission, Vision and Core Values (MVCV)- When done well and with clarity, these three definitions are a permanent guidebook for your organization at every level.
Big 3 Weekly Email - Send an email to your team at the beginning of each week clearly stating what your top 3 priorities are.
The Eisenhower Matrix - Use this proven method of prioritization regularly to decide what you will do, schedule, delegate, or delete.
2. Strategy
Rules (Process) 📝
Healthy State: Clear and Flexible
When the Vision and Mission are well defined, teams are empowered to make strategic decisions using the “why” as their North Star. Goals and Objectives keep the road to success loose, but the final destination clear. This way, when teams hit a blocker or detour, they can pave a different path to the same result without relying on Leadership.
Dis-eased State: Rogue Initiatives, Duplicate Work, Short-Sighted Results
Unclear charters from Leadership that are not contextualized within the greater Mission can generally result in wasted resources of three kinds:
Rogue Initiatives: Too little definition leads to wasted resources in the wrong direction
Duplicated Work: Poor distinction of roles and responsibilities and/or communication between teams can result in too many people solving the exact same problem
Short-Sighted: If Leadership is directing with “what” or “how” instead of “why,” the team can become bottle-necked or short-sighted.
Example (true story), a team’s objective was to drive more users to click a certain button on the page. However, the “why” wasn’t contextualized within the greater Mission. Instead of solving the problem creatively, or finding other ways to arrive at the same intended result, the team actually removed all other buttons on the page, so users had to click the button. Needless to say, Leadership learned to direct their team with more intention.
Tools 🛠️
Some key tools for health at the Strategy level are:
Hire Strategically - When resources are limited, who and how you hire can make or break your team. Check out this hWD article for perspective on the ways this can look.
Right-Size your Project Management Tools - There are plenty of tools to manage teams, how you use them is what matters.
Master Decision Making Through Autonomy - Don’t let strategy get stuck at the top. Check out this hWD article on how to empower your team to carry strategy while staying aligned.
People 🫶
How Generalists Support This
As cross-functional experts, generalists maintain clear intention, connection and direction across teams.
Generalists ensure the intention is clearly defined and readily accessible, empowering teams to stay flexible, creative, and resourceful.
Generalists ensure teams stay connected and informed across initiatives and updates, detangling any crossed wires and eliminating duplicate efforts.
Generalists ensure all initiatives are headed in the same direction–not contradicting, competing for resources, or leaving gaps within the whole.
3. Tactics
Rules (Process) 📝
Healthy State: Organized, Happy and Productive
Vision and Mission are well-defined, and Strategy is loose and Clear. Team members are empowered to make decisions, stretch their creativity and are motivated to contribute to the whole. They feel resourced, safe to ask questions, eager to learn and inspired to build something with their team members. They have clarity on where to find, store and share key information, how and when to communicate, and what they are working on and why. Most importantly, every step or effort they take is contributing to a solid foundation that can be built upon. Both mistakes and successes are documented and learned from.
Dis-eased State: Confused, Disengaged or Burned Out
Team members are juggling competing priorities and contradicting directions from Leadership. Perhaps the Mission says one thing, but what they are building doesn’t seem to align. Maybe their Manager’s instructions are saying one thing, but the Founder is asking for something else. Everyone does things a little differently so files get lost, key decisions aren’t documented or shared and the team spends more time talking about how to do work than doing it at all. Team members work long hours to try to fit it all in, and by the time their brains are done figuring out how or why, they have zero juice left to execute meaningfully. People start to become burned out, unreliable, inconsistent, or disengaged. Worst of all, this becomes the norm, generally overlooked or acceptable because “this is a start-up.”
People 🫶
How Generalists Support This
Introducing a generalist from the beginning can exponentially eliminate the systemic fatigue that happens within small teams. It becomes the generalists’ sole responsibility to answer the questions that nobody has time to answer. Generalists are free agents within the organization to track down answers, document key systems and processes and detangle knots to keep teams moving. Following pockets of vagueness and chaos, they make the implicit explicit, define the unknown, connect key stakeholders at crossroads and continuously redirect energy that is blocked or leaking.
Tools 🛠️
Some key tools for health at the Tactics level are:
Scale Your Leadership - This hWD article is a top-to-bottom guide on how to reach your team at all levels.
Consider your Internal Product(s) - Happy team, happy customers. Consider how your internal products are influencing your team and culture
Master Onboarding & Offboarding - Talk about lost energy! Transitioning team members shouldn’t mean starting over. Check out this hWD article on how to keep the information flowing.
Actually Actionable
Nice article. Now what?
Below are a few exercises from each level of execution to help identify where a generalist’s support could make the most impact.
Health Evaluation: Mission & Vision
Exercise: Solo Reflection [1 Hour]
MVCV: Do you have solid Vision, Mission and Core Values defined? Are they published? When was the last time you revisited them or discussed them with your team?
Calendar Review: Look at your calendar and compare your meetings with your Big 3 for this week and next. Are they aligned? If not, what needs to change? Use the Eisenhower Matrix as needed!
Date your Mission: What is your relationship to the problem you’re on a mission to solve? What are you doing this week to foster that relationship? Schedule blocked time once a week to deepen your relationship with the problem. Some example “dates” with your mission might be:
Schedule a coffee with your customers or visit them to learn more
Visit your favorite coffee shop with just a book or a podcast focused on the problem you’re solving
Take time each morning to write about what keeps you solving this problem, why you care about it, and what will change when it is solved.
Remember, this is one of the most important relationships you are in, so don’t bring a friend or let yourself get distracted on these dates! Keep it solo, baby.
Health Evaluation: Strategy
Exercise: MVCV x Team Audit [2 Hours]
Make a spreadsheet with your Mission, Vision and Core Values as columns. Each row will be your team’s projects and initiatives. Example:
Ask each team lead to add their active initiatives to the spreadsheet and simply respond with a ✅ or a ⛔️ as to whether or not it is aligned with each column.
For each ⛔️, ask the leader to comment on the cell to provide context.
Once completed, remove your team’s access from the spreadsheet and add a column to rank the initiatives by High, Medium, or Low priority/impact.
Sort the initiatives by priority from High to Low.
This matrix will give you a heat map of where to focus your attention to align your initiatives to your MVCV at the strategic level.
Health Evaluation: Tactics [1 Hour]
Exercise: Team Survey
Nothing is more revealing of team health than an anonymous team survey. If truly anonymous, and even executed by a trusted third party or team member, the survey will surely point to the most immediate pain points for your team, which are perfect opportunities to turn frustration and confusion into empowerment and clarity!
Check out tools like CultureAmp or ClearCo. who have existing templates, insightful questions to uncover employee sentiments and helpful data analysis tools to help make taking a pulse painless and insightful.
Before you go
Problems are an inherent and important sign that we are growing as an organization. What we want to make sure of, however, is that we take the opportunity to grow stronger, not weaker from them. Identifying and addressing these symptoms are actually opportunities for building immunity and multiplying the team’s impact. The question is, how early on in your organization do you want to begin investing in your lasting health? It may seem like a nice-to-have early-on, but just as diet, exercise and mindset can impact our lifespan, organizations can live longer and grow faster with embedded agents of health.
Writer: Kelsey
Interested in working with Kelsey through of All Trades to transform your leadership operations? Email founder@weofalltrades.com for more on how to bring her in as an embedded operator in your startup.
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