How can you create a winning team? Implement these key strategies for successful team building:
Strategy #1 – Hire Highly Effective Team Members
Nothing is more important than hiring the right people. This necessitates having a disciplined approach to the hiring process. I recommend these 5 steps to the process:
1) Create job descriptions that can be used as your job posting or advertisement for the position.
2) Hire proactively not reactively, meaning be on the look out for talent all the time not just when you have an opening. Conducting your search through your networks, centers of influence, clients, third party providers, community resources, alumni groups and don’t forget social media, LinkedIn, Indeed.com, etc.
3) Invest in the interview process. Create questions that are designed to assess an applicant’s knowledge, skills, and abilities that match with the role and that assess the key characteristics and attributes that match with your firm culture. When creating a team culture focus on screening for the Four C’s:
- Competence – candidates who know what they are doing
- Character – candidates do what they say they are going to do
- Courage – candidates who meet challenges head-on
- Collaboration – candidates who delight in working with others for the good of the firm
All of these attributes can and should be vetted during the interview process. When team members consistently display these four traits, my experience is that you have begun to lay the foundation for creating a high-performance team environment. Typically the best interview questions focus on gathering information about a candidate’s past performance, because past performance is usually a good predictor of future performance. To consistently hire great people, you need multiple perspectives so involve the key decision makers for the firm in the interview process.
4) Employ testing to measure the entire individual and evaluate skills. To get beyond the resume and the typical interview format, evaluation tools can help give a fuller sense of a candidate’s personal and professional compatibility with your organization (e.g., techniques such as written tests, case studies, role-plays, or simulations). Vendor assessment products (Kolbe, DISC, StrengthsFinder) can also provide an indicator of how the individual will perform in the position.
5) Develop an effective process for onboarding new employees. One step that most firms omit in the hiring process is planning for a successful transition from new hire to employee. A strong onboarding process provides information, training, mentoring and coaching and begins as soon as the candidate has accepted your offer of employment. As you welcome new employees to the firm, you have an opportunity to gain their trust and instill confidence that they have chosen a great place to work. When managed well, onboarding fosters employee engagement and contribution in line with expectations.
Strategy #2 – Empower & Motivate through Delegation
The most successful leaders are those that empower their employees to do their best work every day. Being a leader means motivating your employees to think creatively. It means allowing them the freedom to work unfettered by too many rules, and to trust that each employee has noble intent to do a good job. As a business owner, you must be willing to delegate, create goals, provide feedback, and develop careers—all strategies that will create a great place to work.
As an owner it can be hard to give-up entrepreneurial control as it takes a a lot of up-front time and effort and you can lack confidence in the quality of the results when you aren’t in control of the outcome. I recommend the following process for effective delegation:
- Choose what to delegate
- Define the assignment, requirements, parameters, authority level, checkpoints and expectations
- Select the right person(s)
- Communicate both What and Why
- Follow up
- Accountability
- Provide direction
- Recognize and reward
Strategy #3 – Create a High Trust Environment
When you work with people you trust, more can get done. Organizational trust is derived from alignment – having the organization’s systems, structures and rewards aligned with one consistent objective. When everything is aligned correctly, trust grows. When these various elements are misaligned, trust is reduced or dissipated. People work best when they are placed in a high-trust environment rather than one where everything is locked down tight. To create a high-trust environment, all structures and systems need to be aligned with that objective.
If people inside your organization don’t feel like management trusts them, then all kinds of problems can crop up. These problems in effect become taxes on the performance of the organization. A lack of trust inside your organization can lead to a decrease in productivity and an increase in costs:
- High levels of redundancy and duplication of effort.
- An extensive bureaucracy with rules, regulations & procedures.
- Active internal office politics.
- People becoming disengaged and unmotivated.
- High levels of employee turnover.
When trust is high within an organization, there are significant dividends:
- Shareholder and customer value increases.
- Accelerated growth in sales and profits.
- Enhanced ability to innovate and be creative.
- Improved levels of collaboration and teamwork.
- Better execution of the company’s strategy.
- Heightened loyalty and brand strength.
The most successful advisory firms have built strong positive cultures that are firmly grounded in a meaningful purpose of helping clients create financial goals and making them become a reality. To succeed in that purpose requires:
- Client-first mentality
- Foster and reward: excellence, honesty, and teamwork
- Everyone is treated fairly
- Communication is open, frequent and clear
- Decision making is decisive
- Leaders model the way
