As soon as someone wants to start achieving big goals, the question immediately arises of whom to do it. And this is absolutely normal – you need to understand how to assemble a team so that it is possible to achieve more ambitious results with it than you can do yourself. Mentor of business owners Stanislav Kuzavov talks about the intricacies of selecting people for the team.
Who is in charge of the team: the leader or the subordinates?
I would not put the question “either-or”, because every element is important. Naturally, the leader will be the basis of this entire process, and it depends on him who gets into his team. That is why he is often considered the main one on the team. This means that he cannot afford to be relaxed, uncharged, unfocused on the goal, to be inattentive to details and trifles.
But the subordinates are the strongest elements. When one of them mopes, drops out, or simply does not understand some processes, this becomes a destabilizer of the entire system.
Despite the fact that all elements are important, I give my preference to the leader. Where there are leaders, people can gather there, a team can be created there, which sooner or later will develop into a team that can produce some kind of extraordinary result.
Everything depends on this person, on his ambitions, on his strength of focus on this main goal, the strength of intentions with which he is ready to take risks, sometimes things that are inconvenient for himself, because he will have to cope with a lot.
How to select employees who will help achieve your goals?
This is a very broad question, but again it is about who picks up. We are looking for people for ourselves, we select for certain purposes. Of course, over the past 10-15 years, selection tools have been strengthened by various system tests, exercises, and verification schemes that help to extract the maximum information from a potential candidate in order to understand where under what condition it is best to apply it.
Whatever we say about our mind, which is trying to read something for itself in the resume of a potential candidate, employees are always chosen intuitively. This is 3-4 seconds, and you already know “yes” or “no”, and then just an explanation for 30 minutes – an hour, how much this employee is needed or not needed. If this is to be believed, then the person who chooses must be in a resourceful state in order to at least hear this signal and understand it.
Nevertheless, what exactly are we trying to look for or test in the employees with whom we will achieve our goals? Of course, each goal, and each project is different, but nevertheless, the key parameter that would be important to always check is the willingness to take responsibility.
The second point, which is important, is the exactingness to oneself, which gives rise to further perseverance, which allows you to just close, reach out, and complete tasks. Having assumed obligations, a person with high demands on himself cannot quit and leave, he will continue to seek resources, and will definitely bring the matter to the end.
It is also essential to see the employee’s habits and skills that will help close the issue. If an employee has been training for the last 5-10 years, repeating in a large number of repetitions what he has to do, there is a very big chance that this particular employee will give a good result because he does not need to invent, he does not need to invent, he does not need much teach, he already automatically does a lot of things that we just need.
And, finally, the desire of the candidate himself to do what is offered to him, not just for the sake of money, but plunging into the process.
Do you need to train employees yourself or should you try to find ready-made ones?
Of course, the desire of any leader to find people who do not need to be taught and can immediately be employed is wonderful. But most often you still have to twist and finish teaching, even if these people were doing something similar, there is still a difference – in people, in the organization of processes.
Any project, any teamwork is learning, and it is very important that the assembled team be ready to continuously learn, and learn on the go, including in difficult situations. Accept changes, see what doesn’t work for you, look for opportunities and options for more interesting, better solutions, and implement them. This is an ongoing process. And that team is strong and can focus as much as possible on self-learning, when it instantly adapts to any situation, enters into learning processes, and immediately learns from its mistakes.
The second point is motivation. Of course, we strive to ensure that society produces self-motivated people, but, unfortunately, today self-motivation is the lot of strong and adult people who know how to negotiate with themselves. Not everyone is capable of this, and therefore it is natural that someone stronger appears who tries to find the motives of other people and use these motives to complete a particular task. Usually, these are bosses and team leaders.
The leader is doomed to the constant support of his people, the search for a motive, inspiring words, or some special solutions. This is not easy, but very entertaining work. The leader who has mastered this to perfection, most likely, very quickly turns the team into a powerful, strong core that flies towards the goal.
How to encourage your team?
The most powerful form of encouraging or working out some mistakes among employees is developmental feedback. Any leader needs to decide for himself when, in what form, and how each employee who is in his team will receive this feedback on the performance or non-performance of his work.
Everyone should receive it regardless of whether the task is completed or not completed. Such feedback will encourage the vision of new options that will improve and develop.
How to understand with whom and when to part?
Sooner or later, you really have to make a decision about dismissal. I know for sure that one of the most correct, environmentally friendly ways is when the manager really fought for the employee himself quite often, even when the employee himself had already decided to leave.
This means that you need to knock on the potential of a person, trying to open it in some way. This is very important, because if you do not try to pull out this potential, then the work will turn into a continuous selection of people who, for some reason, should immediately turn out to be suitable for our tasks. But when the employee already shows too much that he is going against himself and is not ready to work with himself, the leader, who has tried a lot of approaches, has no choice but to decide on parting.
Another point is if the employee goes against the company. I’m not even talking about trade secrets, I’m not talking about theft, but about situations where it destroys the atmosphere inside, and contradicts goals, internal ideology, and values. Then the head should not endure, and after a few comments, you should already be fired.