RSS
DURHAM – For an entrepreneurial leader, building a great team is crucial to success. Early teams never have the complete set of skills needed to take the company from their beginnings to achieving their goals. Key questions to be answered are:
- What skills do you need?
- How do you find, attract and hire the best talent?
- How do you motivate and retain the team?
Get strategic. In deciding what skills are needed, begin with strategy. In the future, what will make you different from the competition? What capabilities will be crucial to your success? What skills must you have on the team to achieve your goals, to create value, and to protect that value? You cannot afford the premier experts in every function; you must choose the few skills that are an absolute requirement for success. You must also consider that your needs will change over time, and the more rapidly you grow the more rapidly you will need to adapt! Finally, any good strategy includes a set of values or a target culture for your company.
Get tactical. Get your team together and build a specification, or at least a list of responsibilities, for each key position. Make sure that the parts – the individual positions - add up to a whole. Frankly assess how well the collective talent that you’ve got today matches up with what you will need to succeed tomorrow. In the areas where your team needs to be improved, create a new specification by removing responsibilities – on paper - from existing team members, and creating a specification for a new team member. Get the team comfortable with this new distribution of responsibilities before the first candidate comes in the door. Once you hire someone go back and adjust the team’s specifications to match the person you actually hired. Nothing is more motivating to a new team member than well-thought-out, crystal clear responsibilities that everyone understands. Use the specification later to measure their progress and performance. Keep it accurate as the team or the landscape changes.
Get the best. Depending on the stage of your venture and how much money you want to spend your approach to finding the right candidate will vary. You and your frugal team can use personal contacts, networking, newspaper advertisements, or the Internet. I have found some great employees through newspaper advertising, but it has only worked for me about half the time – and then you are back to square one. Executive recruiters, contingency or retained, cost 15% to 50% of a year’s salary but I have had some great results – and I’ve never failed to find a good match. You need to be proactive and aggressive; while you are evaluating a potential team member, they are evaluating you as well. Sell your vision for the company, and make the process personal. Appeal to the candidate’s need to win and show them how they will be critical to your success. Make sure that the chosen candidate is a fit not only for technical skill but in terms of values and culture as well. When you move forward present a competitive and aggressive offer, including an ownership stake in the company. Even though you are selling hard, resist the urge to oversell your company; use your company’s shortcomings to highlight their potential value to your company.
Get the most. Take a personal role in motivating and retaining the team - it’s your job! Money is just the start, and it’s irrelevant if other key elements aren’t there. The way that you lead the team will be the most important factor. Share your vision with the team, and be open about the challenges. Share your passion and demonstrate your determination. Teach and mentor; share your talent. Perhaps most important of all, demonstrate humility; listen to what your team is telling you. Other key motivators vary with the specific role or the person, but in general people want the potential to contribute and be recognized, and many want a pathway to personal and career growth, with increasing responsibilities, title, and salary.
Get tough. Objectively evaluate each team member at least annually and update their list of responsibilities. Hold people accountable. It’s not that hard to know when you need to make a change to your core team, but it is very hard to decide to do it. After all, you probably recruited them and you’ve been working shoulder-to-shoulder for some time! But you cannot succeed with everyone, and if your company is changing rapidly your needs change just as rapidly. When you have to make a change, do so with grace and support. Forgive yourself and move on to achieve your goals!
Rich West is a local serial entrepreneur and consultant with 25 years of project management, sales and marketing, and general management experience. He received his graduate management education at the Drucker School in Claremont, California and did his undergraduate work at Duke. Rich was founder and CEO of TriVirix, which placed first in Deloitte & Touche’s Technology Fast 50 in 2004, and is currently CEO of Advanced Liquid Logic. Rich would like to recognize Gary Roberts and Chris Price for their help with a panel on this topic and for their contributions to this article.
