9 tips for building a dream team for a startup
Why can a skateboard champion without work experience be more useful for a startup than a middling specialist? Marina Treschova, CEO of Fast Lane Ventures, gives 9 tips for aspiring entrepreneurs to build a dream team.
The main goal of any aspiring entrepreneur is to create an effective business. No matter how brilliant you are, this alone will not work. The future of the company depends on who you hire as associates. It is associates, not employees. To be a professional and to carry out your work efficiently is a necessary but not sufficient requirement.
Work in a startup is not an easy task, requiring stress of mental and physical strength, increased dedication and often a change in life priorities. In such a situation, money is a powerful, but not the main motivator. To work with full dedication, a person must be sick for the cause. Your task is to find and retain just such people, to form a dream team. Here are a few basic rules to help you do this.
Hire the best
The main rule - do not save on professionals. Yes, they cost more, they are more difficult to interest and retain, but the effectiveness of their work will cover all costs. You don’t have to control every step, waste time explaining and correcting other people's mistakes, do their work for them, in the end, change the composition and start learning anew. Better to take one super-specialist than two “middle peasants”. Distributing the budget available to you, divide it into two parts. One of them will go to the team, the other to the rest.
Look for heroes
Look not only for those who can do something well or even very well, look for those who have achieved outstanding success. At least in something. Let it be skateboarding or crocheting. This is not a self-sufficient criterion, but a person who has achieved outstanding success in any business is more likely to spend sleepless nights on your project and is less likely to get out of the way halfway. After all, he has already proved that he knows how to invest maximum labor and energy in his chosen business and achieve his goal. And then it depends on you in many respects - whether you will succeed in captivating him to new heroes.
Become HR Director
The deeper your involvement in the recruitment process, the more likely you are to find exactly what you need. Not even the most competent HR will form a team for you. He will be able to adequately assess professional experience, but he will not be able to “feel” a person, his energy potential, willingness to work in conditions of high speeds and hard deadlines. Only you, as a leader, are able to understand how suitable a job seeker is for you not only in professional, but also in personal qualities, is there a chance to work together, how developed is his “fighting spirit”. At the stage of forming the key team of your business, you will have to take on the HR function.
Play ambition
Good employees are hard to get. But it’s even harder to keep them. Usually they do not have difficulty finding a job, and salary does not always become the main motivator when choosing a new place. What can you offer these people? Of course, a challenge, non-standard tasks, the possibility of self-realization! The main motivator for the transition of people to startups is their own ambitions and ambition. Use them for good. Your task as a leader is to turn tough deadlines, increased loads and high speeds into a challenge to professional qualities, an incentive for creativity and the search for innovative solutions. It doesn’t matter what it is about - changing the design or increasing KPI in terms of sales. Your task is to add excitement, rekindle the fighting spirit, teach people to enjoy the work done and move forward. In the end, that's what they came here for!
Do not isolate departments from each other
The next step is the organization of effective work. For startups, the optimal structure is one that involves the active involvement of specialists in various fields in solving common business problems. From the first days of the project’s life, it is impossible to allow the transformation of different departments into “islands”, focused solely on solving their own problems. For example, in our country, the development of an IT platform is always carried out with the active involvement of marketing specialists. They describe what needs of the market and consumers should be in it. Product managers join the solution to the problem and immediately “translate” market terminology into the IT language. Such an interaction sooner or later gives a synergistic effect. Understanding the needs of the business, the IT professional can, in turn, propose improvements that will help more efficiently build the work of marketers.
Do not be afraid to change people
It happens that people work well, but not 100% the way you would like. And you put up with this, believing that it is better that way than nothing. Relying on such “middle peasants”, you run the risk of leaving your startup in the same category. Try to honestly answer your question: if I recruited the team again, would I choose the same people? If the answer is “yes”, look for another reason: maybe you set the priorities incorrectly or did not organize the workflow optimally. If the answer is “no,” act before it is too late.
Everyone has the right to make mistakes, but if he is not able to analyze the shortcomings and repeats the same mistakes, it is better to fire him. This also applies to you. With the difference that your "dismissal" from the business will be a direct result of your indecision and inability to make tough decisions.
Take fire on yourself
At the stage of developing a new business, the team is usually still small, and the amount of work, on the contrary, tends to infinity. And no matter how competently you set tasks and prioritize, you will have to control almost every step, take part in every business process and ultimately be responsible for every achieved (or unattained) result. Somewhere the functionality is flawed, technical flaws come out, sales go at the wrong speed, as a result, the business slows down. Who's guilty? Technical Director? Sales Manager? No, only a leader.
Even if there are several partners in a startup, when the time comes to make difficult decisions, the team must know whose word will be the last. On your shoulders is a huge burden of responsibility: to the team, investors, consumers, your family and yourself. There is only one recipe - stock up on patience and a philosophical outlook on life. Ultimately, this is your choice.
Delegate authority
Still, being responsible for your business does not mean doing everything yourself. But we must not forget that when delegating some work to another person, the right to make decisions must also be delegated. Do not try to constantly interfere in the work of your subordinates and pull the blanket over yourself, regardless of the complexity and urgency of the situation. Experience shows that as the business develops, team building and mutual trust grows, total control by the leader weakens, and employee awareness grows. Do not try to slow down this process.
Do not change your principles
Of course, each of us has our own ideas about what is good and what is bad. Talking about ethics and morality in business is a thankless task. It's just that everyone has a trait that you can’t enter in any case. And everyone has it different. Someone will not flinch, having fired the father of five children, and someone will be tormented by conscience because he raised his voice to his subordinate. There can be no advice for all occasions. It happens that difficult times come, requiring difficult decisions.
There is a good way to understand if you can step on the throat of your principles: imagine that you need to go out and justify your choice in front of an audience full of people. If you do not flinch, then you are firmly confident in your decision, then it comes from the inside and it means it is right. Not at all, but for you and your business. Follow your beliefs clearly. Be confident in yourself.
And finally - love the people who work for you, try to make their life better in all available ways. And they will answer you and your business in return!
Original article on Forbes.ru