Business Team Development Strategies – People Management Made Easy

I’ll give you the short version here.  For the long version, just email me for the 13 Staff Development Strategies.

1. Build Better Specs

Always start with what you want to end up with!  List the outcomes, the results that you want from anyone filling a position in your team.

2. Align Personality, Skill and Character With the Role

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that certain personality types are better suited to certain tasks than others.  For example, if we simply divide people into “big-picture” and “detail oriented”, which of those two types would you like doing your bookkeeping or accounting?  And which might be better suited to sales, strategy and marketing?

For help in understanding how you might gain some insights into who might be suited to what in your business, ask me for a fun (but instructive) start with the Simpsons’ Personality Test .

3. Write Your Advertisement to Your Ideal Candidate

If you write an average ad, you’ll get an average unemployed (our about-to-be-unemployed) person replying to it. Is that what you want?

Given that, if you attract the wrong people to your position and make a poor selection, you could be weeks or months of salary and hair-tearing down the track before you terminate them and start again, is it worth spending time (maybe hours) and resources (maybe hundreds of dollars for a skilled copywriter) to end up with an ad powerful enough to pull the perfect candidate for your position, away from their current employment and straight to your door?

4. Sell Your Vision For Your Business

Do you want people who work (just) for money?  Or do you want people who want to contribute to something fabulous, that’s bigger than themselves, into which they can put a piece of themselves and of which they can feel proud?

5. Tailor a Quick Assessment Process

Sometimes it’s just smart to sit down with a professional recruiter at this point (and not before this point!) and have them take charge of the pre-selection process for you.

If you are one of those “hands-on” people who wants to run the selection process from end to end, it may still be a smart move to consult a recruitment specialist to develop a set of questions specific to your needs, that will sort the candidates into “As” (appear to have everything we want, right now); “Bs” (could qualify with a bit of development work on our part); and “Cs” – not for this position.

6. Discover Their Goals and Aspirations First

Give someone enough rope and they are likely to hang themselves so turn the traditional job interview process around by letting the candidate do the talking.

Use purposeful, open questions (ie, questions that can’t be answered with a single word); ask follow on questions based on their answers to explore some depth to better understand your candidate; occasionally use extending questions (“Tell me a bit more”) or friendly silence to encourage them to go on.

Bottom line: You’ll learn much more by listening to them talk and having them ask questions about the job, than you ever will by telling them about the position.

7. Assess Their Commitment To Your Business’ Goals

This is an “imprecise measure” at the best of times, but what you are looking for at this stage in the assessment process is an indication as to whether this person is a “committer” or a “renegade”.

Committers are “joiners”; they like other people; they like working with others, collaborating and teaming to build projects larger than they can handle alone.  The look for causes to join, visions to buy into, and goals to meet.

Renegades are “users”; they intend to use the business, its resources and the position almost solely for their own ends.

8. Clearly Convey Your Core Concepts

If you’re wanting someone to give more than their physical presence and base labour to your business you are going to have to sell them your Vision for the business (the “picture of perfection” towards which you are striving; your Mission (the path you are following to achieve that Vision); your Values (the boundaries of behaviour along that path); your Goals (the milestones on the path; dated measures of performance); and your Code of Conduct (the way we treat each other, our Customers, and the assets of the business).

9. Craft A Powerful Investment Process

When you bring any new team member on board, you are faced with an inevitable investment of time and resources to enable them to come up to speed and meet your performance requirements as quickly as possible, so why not convey this process – explicitly – as the beginnings of your on-going “Investment in Them”?

10. Design A Performance Assessment & Recognition Process

We’ll often ask staff, “Is your boss happy with your performance?”, only to be told, “She must be; she hasn’t fired me yet!”

Is this level of feedback likely to promote top performance among team members?  Or could it be done better?

11. Create An Investment Plan With All Staff

You’ll need to give some thought as to what you will need to invest in each of your team members to bring them to a level competence and commitment that will make them your strongest and most valuable asset.  The obvious candidates are “training” and “positive work experience”, but the less obvious candidates can be as, or even more, important:  “inclusion”, “security”, “recognition”, “belonging”, “personal and professional growth” and more.

12. Find Out What Makes Them Tick

We’d hope that you had a fair idea of what makes your new (and old) team members tick before you selected them, and this point re-iterates the fact that it’s nearly useless trying to motivate people with your “external goals” – ie, goals or rewards that you provide as opposed to their own internal, private or personal goals.

13. Rate Your Performance as Their Mentor, Coach & Guide

It has been said that “feedback is the breakfast of champions” so does it make sense, if you are really aspiring to have and to lead an excellent team of people, that you seek and welcome feedback on a regular basis?

If you know what to do, but are short on how to do it; or, if you know what and how but also know that you will have a challenge committing to apply your knowledge, it’s probably time to talk to us about how we can get you to where you want to be, more quickly, more surely and more safely than you can get there on your own.

Remember, the expanded version of these 13 steps is yours for the asking!