Key Takeaways for Building A Winning Team
Building a great team requires a deliberate and strategic approach.
Understanding your organizational values and identifying the right cultural fit are essential for attracting top talent.
Investing in employee development and fostering alignment are crucial for long-term success.
Retaining talent requires understanding and meeting the individual needs of your employees.
Building a High-Performance Team
"You're only as good as your team." This simple truth underscores the critical importance of building a high-performing team. But how do you do it? It's not magic; it's about having proven systems and processes for attracting, developing, and retaining talent. Let's break down these three key phases.
1. Attracting Talent: Defining Your Needs and Finding the Right Fit
Forget just "selecting" talent. The process starts with strategic recruiting. You need to attract the right people in the first place.
Define Your Organizational Values: What's truly important to your business? What kind of culture do you want to foster? Clearly defining your values is the foundation for attracting individuals who align with your vision. Include your value in your job postings and on your website so applicants have a clear picture of the type of person you want to add to your team.
Identify Your Ideal Candidate: Reflect on your team's strengths and weaknesses. Where are the gaps in your team? What skills and personality traits must you add to your team to take it to the next level?
Personality: Consider the Big 5 Personality traits of agreeableness, openness to experience, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion. What personality type do you need more of on your team?
Skill Set: Document your organization's activities using the business model canvas. Evaluate where you have gaps and define skills that would benefit your organization most.
Cast a wide net: Employers frequently focus too much on what someone has done in the past and not enough on the future potential of an individual. Great employees thrive in environments that give them room to grow. Look for curiosity, humility, intelligence, and willingness to grow. You can find some of the best talent in the most unlikely places.
2. Developing Talent: Investing in Growth and Alignment
Once you've recruited the right people, it's time to invest in their development. Employee development involves three key aspects:
Define Roles: Define the ideal profile for each role, outlining the tasks and skills required for success and how individuals' work impacts others. You will want to complete this profile for each role within the organization. Identifying the borders between roles will make it easier to determine where there are opportunities for employees to grow, diversify their skill sets, and provide synergistic value to the organization.
Skill Development: Provide training and resources to help employees master desired skills. Your training program should include general onboarding training that orients the employee to their role and how to work with others within the organization. In addition, it should consist of ongoing individual development planning that focuses on leveraging the employees' strengths and mitigating their weaknesses.
Organizational Alignment: Educating employees on organizational culture is often overlooked but critical to creating a harmonious working environment. Your values should be seen in everything you do, from how you hold meetings to how you conduct performance reviews to even the signage and decor in your workspace. Employees should not doubt what you value and how you expect them to engage with you, other employees, customers, and other key stakeholders.
3. Retaining Talent: Valuing and Appreciating Your Team
Developing talent is an investment in time, money, and resources. Like any other investment, it is critical to have a plan for how you will mitigate risk and reap the benefits of your returns. The good thing for you is that retaining employees is simple if you hire the right people, understand your employee goals, and focus on long-term relationship building.
Understand Employee Values: What motivates your employees? Is it work-life balance, financial security, or professional growth? During the hiring process, hiring managers take the time to understand individual strengths, weaknesses, and goals. This type of assessment should not stop once an employee is hired. It is critical to foster a trusting environment where your employees update you on changes in their goals, aspirations, or reasons for working.
Provide What They Value: Once you understand what your employees seek, you have a few choices. You can provide what they want, let them know their ask is unrealistic, or develop a plan with your employees to put you in the position to give them what they want. Healthy relationships are mutually beneficial. Relationships with one clear winner and one clear loser are doomed for conflict. Work with your employees to find common ground and achieve win/win outcomes.
Think Long Term: Retaining employees allows you to benefit from the residual value of your investment in their development. Losing an employee has multiple costs. You have to spend money finding and training a new employee. Your competition benefits from the talent you have helped to develop. And any change in personnel tends to impact other employees on the team. Every effort should be made to keep employees who make the team strong by their presence.
3 Steps Process
These three high-level tasks—attracting, developing, and retaining—provide a solid foundation for building a successful team. While the process can be complex, focusing on these core principles will set you on the right track. Start implementing these principles today, and you'll be well on your way to building a stronger team tomorrow.
Thank you for reading the latest installment of the Your Path to Business Success series. We started this series to give small business owners a do-it-yourself guide for scaling and growing their businesses. If you have enjoyed this series, please share it with a friend.
If you have a question about anything that is covered or feel you would benefit from additional guidance and support, please reach out to me at dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com
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