One of the main tasks of a leader, a company founder, a startup CEO, is to build a dream team that is capable of keeping the entire startup running. No one can achieve ambitious goals on their own. With most of the responsibilities to the future team, investors, clients and/or consumers, a leader must have someone to trust. These people will communicate personally and discuss business issues. They will present proposals and make decisions, influence the corporate culture and build the environment themselves. If we step aside from the advice to ‘be inspiring, be an example and be passionate about what you do’, we will discover a series of more practical tips that you should always keep in mind.
1. Become a human resource manager yourself. You have to distinguish the right person from the wrong one. A hiring manager can help you gauge a candidate’s professional experience and focus, but it’s up to you to feel if this is the person you want to work with. Choosing the core of the team is the responsibility that starts with you.
2. Hire the best professionals you can find. This is the main rule: hire people with knowledge in different areas. They cost more and it is more difficult to arouse and maintain their interest, but the efficiency of the work and your contributions will cover the salary expenses. It will also be much less necessary to monitor each and every one of your activities. Hiring a ‘sort of’ professional can eventually lead to the need for a replacement, so why not prevent it right away?
3. Offer challenges. Money is a good motivator, but it may not be the best. In many cases, seasoned professionals have no problem looking for work, so they would prefer a perfect opportunity for self-actualization over a small pay raise. Ambitions, combined with creative, challenging, and non-standard tasks, can play a critical role in launching a startup.
4. Gather the adversity of personalities. Your team members don’t have to be the same age, gender, character traits, ethnicity, whatever. A diversity combined with experience, professionalism and a shared vision of strong personalities, is a strong and effective backbone for the team.
5. Look for people with accomplishments. Whatever these achievements, whether they refer to your area of expertise or not. This shows the dedication of a person to what he likes and likes to do. Afterwards they must have all the necessary conditions to enjoy their work, and an additional desire to set goals, do their best and succeed, just as they did before.
6. Never hire full time for reasons of urgency. You’ll likely end up looking for a replacement eventually. Loss of time and money can be avoided by offering a single amount of work. Or maybe you’ll be lucky enough to quickly find the person you need, who knows.
7. Establish the mission of your business venture, shared vision, values and objectives. You need to agree on what you want to achieve and the ways in which you will achieve it.
8. Be clear about expectations and goals, and encourage teamwork. Clearly define the responsibilities of each player on the team. However, don’t isolate anyone (this applies to a single person as well as an entire department) to focus solely on their own duties. Teamwork is always much more effective. Specialists in different areas – a CEO, a technical specialist, a marketing manager, whoever – will contribute to solving common business tasks; for a startup, it’s an optimal solution right from the start.
9. Be patient with mistakes. If a person repeatedly makes the same mistakes, unable to analyze and improve the result of the work, perhaps that is not the person he has been looking for. But in general we all make mistakes, including you, and it’s best to learn from them and solve problems together.
10. Help people develop their skills. This will boost the performance of the whole team in the end. Practice brainstorming and never let anyone rest on their laurels.
11. Handle conflict positively. Conflicts are inevitable, but they can become opportunities to improve teamwork so that each party in conflict is satisfied with the final decision. After all, it is in discussions that the best decisions can be discussed and made.
12. Pay attention to the problems of your team members. Unspoken thoughts and feelings can negatively affect the overall atmosphere. Be open with people and allow them to openly express their feelings, including negative ones, help them if you can.
13. Build trust, trust and mutual awareness. From the beginning, the leader has full control over all aspects of a business, but as it grows, this control weakens as associates begin to make decisions for themselves. This process is natural, and trying to stop it means slowing down the growth of your business.
Bonus: 14. Have fun together. We spend a large part of our lives at work, and we must do everything possible to live it. Spending time outside of work together, with people willing to do it, is a healthy sign for the team. Apart from training courses or corporate celebrations that may take place in your company, it is good to simply get together for a night out or to celebrate a team member’s birthday. Work together, have fun together, and make work fun for the sake of a friendly atmosphere during the hardships of busy days.
