Building skilled teams: a Change Makers masterclass

Read about the latest event in our masterclass series.

Our masterclasses

This programme blends technical expertise, commercial knowledge, and the experience of other entrepreneurs to provide our ventures with a toolkit to deliver growth and subsequent impact.

To date, our ventures have worked together on innovation canvases, taken part in fireside chats with other founders from the community, and learned techniques and frameworks in a number of workshops with experts from across the innovation rcosystem on key subjects like developing a value proposition and planning market entry.

This content is all designed with deep tech chemistry and its niche challenges at its heart.

“It’s great to just take a moment with outstanding tutors and down tools and really think about what you’re doing. And particularly when it’s in a glorious room at the RSC with founders who are going through similar challenges to what we’re going through.”

Our Building Skilled Teams masterclass

This masterclass gathered 27 of our participants and focussed on giving them the tools to build the skills and team structures to support technical and commercial growth in their teams, align those teams for maximum efficiency and impact, and promote collaboration. The day started with classroom-style learning with business management expert Doyin Olorunfemi , who utilised her expertise in strategy, innovation, and upskilling micro-businesses and SMEs to help our ventures work through their key challenges on the topic of collaboration, recruitment, and cross-functional team-working.

Each of our founders and leaders had the opportunity to bring a key challenge for the day, sharing with our expert and the rest of the group to get their opinions, experiences, and expertise.

As part of this masterclass, the founders tackled a diverse range of growth and leadership challenges, such as:

• Creating advisory boards that deliver meaningful strategic value.
• Navigating the shift from a lean set-up to managing physical offices and assets.
• Developing future leaders by preparing technical talent for management roles.
• Building and engaging distributed teams across multiple regions.
• Scaling sustainably by balancing recruitment ambitions with financial discipline.

This variety in challenges can be where an event like our masterclasses can really shine, as it brings together founders and leaders in the start-up community and lets them compare notes and see what others have done.

A toolkit from our business management expert

Following our participants sharing their challenges and discussion about how these challenges affected other ventures in the room, our facilitator took them into some classroom learning.

In this session our facilitator brought her expertise of different company structures, the roles that different team members can play and how these can overlap for efficiency in a small business, and case studies of previous start-ups and their successes and failures.

 

The ventures worked through exercises on team dynamics, communication, how to balance accountability and consulting the right members of the team, as well as how to tackle hiring to effectively fill skills gaps and manage wrong hires, with group discussions and the opportunity to compare approaches. A fireside chat with Lise Honsinger In the afternoon, the founders got the opportunity to hear from Notpla Chief Revenue Officer Lise Honsinger , who shared their journey developing plastic alternatives from seaweed. This session ranged from where to make cuts versus spending money on more experienced hires, handling the cultural shift from scrappy start-up to more established business, effectively rewarding performance, and how to build a board that will effectively support your business and its growth.

“A lot of the time as the managers, we focus on the bottom 10% of people. But we need to be thinking more about the top 10% of people, rewarding them, but also encouraging them to try something else and avoiding them burning out.”

There was also an opportunity to learn from Lise about managing some of the less pleasant aspects of being a founder and leading a business, such as what to do when things go wrong, how to handle wrong hires or redundancies. She also shared her expertise on approaching inclusion and diversity and how to handle progression.

“The first people you are hiring are like you. They have an entrepreneurial mindset and are willing to take a punt and take less security. But from 15, you’re starting to hire more specialists. For me, 25-50 people is a real cultural shift. It’s a shift from a group of people to a company and you need to have processes.”

We were delighted to be able to bring together this group of changemakers to work together on their challenges, and we’re looking forward to seeing them at our next masterclass, which will cover “Lab infrastructure planning and R&D strategies”.

Interested in attending future masterclasses or joining our cohorts as a deep tech chemistry start-up? Get in touch to discuss your options.

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