The Leader Is the Problem — And the Only Solution: A 5-Step Framework for Building FOAK Teams That Deliver

Most analyses of FOAK failures mention faulty technology, overambitious bets, financing squeeze, or supply chain hiccups. 80% of the time, that’s simply not true. The real reason is that the team stops working. Most of the analysis is done by outsiders, who have no idea of the internal team dynamics, and the team itself rarely speaks about what really happened.

I've seen this pattern enough times that I no longer find it surprising. A founding team that moved fast and made good decisions in the lab starts to fragment under the pressure of commercial-scale execution. Factions form. Decisions stall. Blame circulates. The founder spends twelve hours a day putting out fires that shouldn't exist. And the project bleeds months — months that, in FOAK, you don't get back.

No amount of pizza parties, team-building retreats, or company values workshops will fix this. I've attended plenty of those events. People smiled. They went home. Nothing changed.

What follows is the framework I've built — from scaling from 3 to 300-person wind turbine operation at Rosatom, to running a battery gigafactory development at TVEL, to advising FOAK founders across Europe — for building teams that execute when the stakes are real.

Why Team Leadership Is the Most Important Framework

There is one thing that underpins all other frameworks I write about. Your strategy and business plan will be shaped by co-founders, advisors, and key executives — not just you. Your pilot-to-FOAK journey will be built by engineers, contractors, and project managers. Your off-take agreements will be negotiated by your commercial team. Your supply chain will be assembled by procurement and operations. Your investor relationships will be managed alongside a board.

Every framework I've described — financing, off-takes, EPC selection, supply chain, FOAK planning — will be implemented by your team. You'll take an active role, yes. But the success of each one depends entirely on how well your team executes.

So how do you make sure they do?

By walking through the five steps below.

Step 1. Be Your Company's Culture

I once interviewed Mark Hoppe, a VP at SkySails — a German hardware scale-up that makes kites to capture wind energy — and something he said made my eyes pop. Not a single employee had ever left the company voluntarily.

"There are no failures, just learnings," he told me. "We are a company that always wants to learn, and everyone is committed to learn more every day."

SkySails went through a painful downsizing at one point. They rebuilt. But the culture held — because it wasn't built on perks or posters. It was built on how the leaders behaved.

There is an old Russian saying: a fish rots from the head. The English version says the same thing. Every problem in your organisation traces back to the top. What you say, what you do, and how you act are noticed and filed away by your team. When they see a consistent gap between your words and your behaviour, no amount of inspiring speeches will convince them to follow your values. The only way to build a real culture is to become its living embodiment.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

First, sit down alone and write out how you want your team to behave. Should they follow orders or show initiative? What principles should guide them when there's no superior around to tell them what to do? Write those answers down. Then put the page away and choose to live it — every day, whether or not anyone from the team is watching.

Don't hold a values workshop. Don't laminate anything and don’t stick it to the wall. Instead, look for moments in everyday interactions — a Monday meeting, a factory floor walk-through, a one-on-one — where you can demonstrate what company values looks like. Not by announcing "this is the culture of our company," but by pointing to what you would do, and expecting the same.

I wanted my team to take ownership of deadlines. So at one Monday meeting, after assigning tasks, I asked everyone to suggest their own deadlines. Before they answered, I told them I believed they were responsible professionals, free to choose how and where they would do the work. That single change signalled more about the culture I wanted to build than any speech ever could.

The flip side matters equally. When someone acts contrary to your values, interrupt them immediately and explain why. You don't need to punish on the spot. But you need to signal clearly that you won't tolerate the behaviour. And when someone does follow your example, make it visible. Reward it publicly. Show the team which behaviours lead to recognition and advancement.

Do this consistently — when people succeed and when they fail — and your team will pick up the pattern. The informal rules that hold great teams together are not written down. They're modelled on the leader.

Step 2. Account for Cross-Cultural Differences

My Dutch colleagues were genuinely perplexed about Russian attitudes to lunch.

I was facilitating a technology transfer deal between a Dutch startup and a Russian partner, and my Russian team was spending weeks at the Dutch facility. For the Dutch, lunch was a light meal. For the Russians, it was a three-course event. This particular conflict was resolved quickly — the Russians got a two-course meal.

The real problem started after the canteen.

The Dutch work in flat hierarchies. Everyone voices an opinion, and everything is up for debate. Russian companies run on strict top-down command. A subordinate thinks twice before questioning a superior. So when the engineering teams sat together, Russian engineers gave disproportionate weight to whoever ranked highest on the Dutch side. The Dutch, unaware of this, debated freely among themselves, leaving the Russians unsure whom to listen to.

These problems don't announce themselves. They creep in through misread silences, inexplicable friction, and decisions that stall without obvious reason.

Northvolt famously had people from over 100 countries working on their scale-up. That is modern and ambitious. It is also a profound source of coordination problems if you don't address it deliberately.

The best tool I've found for this is Erin Meyer's The Culture Map, which Steven Le Poole presented to me when we were working on a wind turbine technology transfer from the Dutch startup Lagerwey to Russia. Meyer maps cultural differences across eight scales: how people communicate (low-context vs. high-context), how they give feedback, how they lead, how they decide, how they trust, how they disagree, and how they handle time.

For each culture you work with, go through these scales. Where you and a colleague land on the same side, no adaptation is needed. Where you're on opposite ends, acknowledge it explicitly — tell people how you behave, why it matters for the company, and what you expect. Cultural rewiring takes time and has limits. The goal isn't to homogenise. It's to name the differences before they become conflicts.

One important caution: make sure you're distinguishing between cultural differences and actual underperformance. The two are not the same. Don't excuse the latter by blaming the former.

Step 3. Set Up an Onboarding Process to Build Trust

When Alan Mulally arrived at Ford as CEO in 2006, he inherited one of the most dysfunctional leadership teams in American corporate history. His first act wasn't a restructuring. It wasn't a strategy presentation. It was a weekly meeting where every senior executive had to show up in person, report the truth about their part of the business, and listen to everyone else do the same.

The first weeks were pure performance. Every slide came back green. A company losing billions of dollars apparently had no problems at all.

Then one executive showed up with a red slide — a serious problem, disclosed openly in front of the whole team. In Ford's old culture, this was career suicide. Mulally didn't raise his voice. He didn't punish. He thanked the executive. A week later, the slides came back red and yellow all over. The leadership team had learned that trust was real. Ford went from a $17 billion loss to a $9 billion profit within two years — the only major American automaker that didn't need a government bailout.

Mulally didn't fix the cars first. He fixed the team.

The academic foundation for what Mulally did was laid by psychologist Bruce Tuckman in 1965. Tuckman described the path teams follow toward high performance: forming, storming, norming, and performing. New teams start polite and cautious — that's the forming stage. It's a facade, not real trust. Inevitably, conflict surfaces. That's storming, and it's healthy. Then relationships normalise, trust develops, and finally the team performs.

A smart founder uses onboarding to speed up the forming stage — so the team can get to storming quickly, move through it, and start building genuine trust.

In practice, onboarding is almost always the thing startups skip. At various Rosatom subsidiaries, "onboarding" was a 600-page document nobody read. That was it.

You don't have time for that. Here's the compressed version:

Before day one. After the contract is signed, send the new hire a structured onboarding folder. It should include: the founding story and current strategy; an investor-grade financial model; the cap table; an org chart with bios and KPIs for key people; recent board materials; the commercial pipeline; a product and operations overview; and practical matters such as phone numbers and the expense policy. Everything should be digestible in three to four hours. If it's not, trim it.

The first two weeks. This is listening time, not doing time. The new hire should meet everyone they'll be working with through structured introductions in which both parties explain their roles, goals, and how they interact with the rest of the company. Set aside at least two hours per meeting. Don’t rush it - your goal is to help people get through the forming stage quickly, which means giving them more time to learn about each other upfront. At the end of week two, have a long conversation with your new hire: what did they observe, what's unclear, where can the company improve?

The first three months. Expect the storming phase to hit. There will be cultural mistakes, communication failures, and conflict. Older team members will storm into your office, frustrated about the new hire. That's fine. That's part of the process. If it isn't happening, you should be worried — it means the polite facade is still in place. The goal is to move through it, not around it.

Step 4. Set Up a Goal-Tracking System

One thing that makes competitive sport compelling to watch is that you can tell who's winning at a glance. For the teams on the field, the scoreboard is also a powerful motivator — they know instantly whether they need to push harder or protect what they have.

This basic feature is almost completely absent from most FOAK projects.

The only scoreboard I saw in years of corporate work was a sign at the entrance to a uranium mining facility: "Days Without Accidents." It was gloomy, and it also measured the wrong thing — what McChesney, Covey, and Huling in The 4 Disciplines of Execution call a "lag measure." A lag measure tells you what has already happened. By the time you see it, it's too late to act.

What you need are lead measures — the specific activities that predict outcomes. The percentage of supplier-readiness audits completed is a lead measure for whether you'll commission your factory on time. The number of customer validation tests in progress is a lead measure for eventual off-take conversion. Operator error incidents per shift are a leading measure for scrap rates.

Your scoreboard should show three layers:

Your Wildly Important Goal (WIG). The one dominant objective that determines whether this stage of the FOAK succeeds or fails. Commissioning date. First product batch delivered. Series B closed. It should be instantly readable — green, yellow, or red — so anyone in the room can know in under ten seconds whether you're on track.

Two to four lead measures. Updated weekly. Colour-coded. Actionable by the team without waiting for permission — milestones resolved, integration tests passed, key equipment arrived on site.

Key lag measures. Overall factory/project completeness, CAPEX spent, and commissioning readiness. These go at the bottom. Important, but not what the team acts on day-to-day.

The scoreboard doesn't work if it lives in a slide deck that surfaces once a month. Put it on a factory wall, at the entrance to your office, in the canteen. If the team arrives on Monday morning and the scoreboard hasn't been updated, they take it as a signal that leadership doesn't consider the goals to matter. That signal is very hard to reverse.

One more rule: every team should have its own scoreboard, with its own WIG and lead measures that connect clearly to the company's overall WIG. Ownership requires visibility. When people can see in real time whether they're winning or losing — and what they can do right now to move the score — they behave differently.

Step 5. Streamline Meetings and Reporting — Then Delegate

The meeting problem

There's a widely circulated meme that Star Trek civilisations are advanced because their meetings last under three minutes. I've sat through enough FOAK meetings to find this genuinely aspirational.

Different management schools offer very different advice on cadence. Scaling Up by Verne Harnish recommends daily operations meetings and weekly executive strategy meetings. Measure What Matters by John Doerr settles on weekly or bi-weekly. Rework by Fried and Heinemeier Hansson pushes hard for asynchronous communication wherever possible.

Here's what I've learned, building a 300-person wind turbine operation from scratch.

When I was Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer at NovaWind, we had twelve teams working simultaneously — construction, procurement, staff training, cybersecurity, and more. Each had between five and thirty people, spread across Moscow, with frequent travel to wind farm sites and to our Dutch and German technology partners. Most of the processes they managed took more than two weeks to complete. Holding weekly meetings meant people often had nothing new to report. So we moved to bi-weekly meetings, which created enough breathing room for genuine issues to surface — and enough structure to address them.

The trade-off was a weekly reporting template. Three slides, developed with the Roland Berger team under the leadership of David Frans and Daria Koroleva.

Slide one: tasks set two weeks ago, progress against them, tracking against plan. Slide two: tasks for the next two weeks. Slide three: issues where the team needed help from someone outside their group. This third slide had a deliberate design choice behind it — there was no punishment for raising a problem on it. The result was that teams went to great lengths to solve problems before they had to appear on slide three. Knowing a problem would be visible to the whole organisation was incentive enough.

All twelve reports were bundled weekly and sent to every team. This created both healthy competition and unsolicited collaboration. Problems that required input from multiple teams were often resolved before management needed to get involved.

We kept a four-person project management task force whose sole job was to compile the slides, moderate conflict-resolution sessions, and ensure that reporting was on time. They had no authority to make decisions. But they were indispensable for keeping everyone on the same page.

The decision problem

When I later moved to TVEL — part of Rosatom — I encountered the opposite failure mode. Endless meetings. Every decision, from budget approvals to canteen menus, was pushed up the chain of command. People weren't using meetings to exchange information. They were using them as cover for inaction, distributing blame across so many approvers that no single person could ever be held responsible if something went wrong.

Large established organisations can survive this for years. In FOAK, the moment your team stops making tactical decisions independently and starts pushing everything up to you, you have months — not years — before the project implodes.

The solution is decentralised command

I learned this from Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin — a book about leading Navy SEAL teams in Ramadi, Iraq. While this book is obviously not about cleantech and FOAK teams, it was one of the most practically useful books I've read for scale-up contexts. Willink observed that if every decision travels up the chain of command, the organisation becomes slow, reactive, and fragile.

Three things are required for decentralised command to work.

First: full accountability at the top. Delegating authority only works if you — the founder — take complete responsibility for what your team does or doesn't do. If a team member fails, it is your fault: you didn't explain clearly, didn't train properly, didn't provide the right resources. If you're not 100% committed to this, delegation quickly becomes a mechanism for assigning scapegoats. People see through it. They stop owning their decisions. And you're back to making every call yourself.

Second: commander's intent. Your mission must be absolutely clear to everyone — from your deputy to the newest intern. Why are we doing this? What do we aim to achieve? What are the constraints? What's off-limits? If your team understands the intent completely, they can adapt when conditions change, make aligned decisions without waiting for approval, and come up with solutions you wouldn't have thought of yourself.

When I needed to build electric go-karts and organise a televised race in six months to demonstrate our battery technology, I gave two people — my marketing director and my technical director — the mission, the budget, the constraint (safety first, test thoroughly), and the strategic context (crucial for the next investment cycle and a key off-take conversation). I took reports once a month. Six months later, ten electric go-karts raced on camera.

Third: radical simplicity. Your plan must be explainable to the most junior person on the team. If they can't understand it and act on it when something unexpected happens, your plan is too complex. Ask them to explain it back to you. If they can't, go back to the drawing board.

One Last Thing

When people on your team face a problem and come to you for help, they want you to solve it. Don't.

Instead, refer them back to the goals, the constraints, and the available resources. Then ask them what they would do. In my experience, about 90 per cent of the time, they come up with a good enough answer themselves. After two or three visits like this, they stop coming — because now they have the tools to figure it out on their own.

That is the goal. Not a founder who has all the answers. A team that doesn't need to ask.

If you're building a FOAK and you're starting to feel like the only person holding things together — let's talk. That feeling is a warning sign, not a badge of honour.