Creating an effective team for your business is about hiring people with skills that complement each other and using the right management techniques to shape them into a stellar team. Before you embark on putting your team together, make sure you understand how both of these elements work.
Hiring The Right People
There’s more to hiring than looking at education and experience. Put these following tips into practice to make sure you have a great team.
Don’t rush the process. Plan ahead in hiring decisions so you’re not forced to hire people to solve a worker shortage. Hiring under duress leads to bad hires, and sometimes hiring no one is better than taking on some problematic employees. Make sure you check with past employers and conduct interviews with more than one manager so you can compare notes.
Don’t always weigh experience as the greatest asset. Cultural values and attitude are usually more important. If your new team members lack passion and are not open to collaboration and communication, they will be ineffective for the company, even if they have impressive experience. It’s also vital that a person fits in with the culture of the group so that they don’t feel out of place.
Building an Effective Team
After you acquire the best team members, the work doesn’t stop there. You have to use the right management techniques to build these new hires into an effective team.
Start by developing clear picture of how the team should work. You should nail down one to three priorities that define what your goals are and use the onboarding stage to impart the cultural values of the company. Give the team a strong sense of the company’s vision and what is expected of them.
Some managers like to take a hands-off approach with employees because autonomy gives people more ability to feel confident in their job, but it’s also important to give regular feedback. When you establish a regular rhythm of feedback, employees will get used to it and not be put off when you need to adjust their performance.
Everyone has heard the phrase “lead by example” because it’s the best way to get people to adopt the desired approach. If the boss isn’t respecting the company culture and values, then the employees won’t be motivated to do so either.