Sometimes one builds a team from the ground up; at other times, the team is inherited. In the first situation, you can choose people with the attitudes and skills you seek. In the second, you may need to get them to trust you as their leader and to get their support for a vision that may differ from the one to which they signed on.
In either case, any team leader needs the staff to support their vision and share their values and priorities. When you’re hiring for a new team, you try to assess this in interviews; with an inherited team, you must determine this support over time.
Backing shared values and priorities matters. One business school case study tells the story of an experienced manager who hires a standout performer named Pete.
Pete absolutely nails every performance metric required for promotion, brings in tons of money and makes the manager look like a hero. But, alas, Pete is toxic. He berates subordinates and reduces colleagues to tears. At year-end, Pete expects to be promoted. What’s the manager to do?
The “right” answer — although cases never have right answers — is that Pete gets fired. During the class discussion, though, the manager is also found to be at fault for not providing clear early feedback. Pete should not have wasted a year expecting a promotion that would not come, nor should his co-workers have endured a year of Pete’s bullying. Pete’s firing stemmed from his manager’s cowardice.
What, then, should Pete’s manager have done — and how should you go about building a team? Here are some good practices to follow.
Set values. Decide what values you want your team to uphold. Kindness, patience, performance, partnership attitudes, solving problems for your clients rather than selling the top-dollar solution — these all seem to be laudable.
Share these values with the team. While the team may have adopted these values without naming them, communication is powerful. Naming and sharing these values helps frame the context for your team. It’s not fair to fault someone for not doing something that they’ve been expected to absorb by osmosis.
Identify how your values help achieve your mission. Let’s say you’ve been charged with increasing earnings and revenues by 10%. Determine how your values will help achieve (or over-achieve) this goal.
Match your team’s skills to what needs to be done. Here, each person’s uniqueness can become a superpower. One example is when my team took the Clifton StrengthsFinder, which identified each person’s top five strengths out of a list of 34. (It’s a great team-building exercise and delighted everyone with the diversity of our colleagues.)
One person was particularly strong in making connections with others; another had a fierce competitive drive. The first joined the sales team; the other led new product development. Both worked together on the types of analysis and report production delivered to clients. By harnessing their specific skills in targeted efforts, we performed better than if had simply grabbed whoever was nearby and stuck them on a task where one or the other would excel.
Provide frequent feedback. This is where Pete’s manager went wrong (and Pete goofed by not requesting it.) Many organizations are so wary of giving feedback that even an annual performance review is little more than “keep doing what you’re doing.”
Meeting individually with your staff every week keeps communication lines open and prevents accumulated misunderstandings. Think of it like driving a car; if you make frequent small corrections, you keep happily on your way. If you correct your course every 15 minutes, then you have a problem.
Setting the tone
This approach doesn’t guarantee that every hire will succeed. It does, however, set expectations when people first join and gives them warning when things aren’t going well.
No one wants to flounder in an environment that’s a bad fit; it’s destructive to everyone’s time and morale. But a team with shared values, using their best talents to achieve a mission, is a powerful, happy, optimized organization.