Get the right people on the coach. Put them in the right seats. Remove the wrong people. Then start driving. If unsure which road to take, confront the facts with brutal honesty. Determine if we could be the best coach on the road.
With the right people, having probed the hard questions and with a path to being peerless then we have the potential to be the very best.
Get the right people on the coach
Building a team is hard.
For a small team of 10, that last hire is a punchy 10% of your organisation. For a large team of 100, one more employee complicates an intricate web of communication with multiple new permutations.
Two of my biggest learnings:
- If on the fence, do not hire. Wait to be excited about a candidate. Do not hire simply because there is a role to be filled.
- Be ruthless during probation. Ask the hiring manager three times, “Given what you now know, would you hire this person again?” Don’t settle for anything less than a firm yes.
A candidate is unmasked when they roll up their sleeves in their day to day work. Barack Obama has some wise words on what to seek in people – capable doers.
In the right seats
Great people may end up in the wrong seat – for them and for you.
- The Head of Department who is a wonderful team player and committed to the company but is not leading strategy. The right seat could be within their team.
- The creative Growth Marketer who spends 50% of her time on customer communications. The right seat could be 100% focused on acquisition.
- The Principal Engineer who manages the tech team but is your best developer and loves to code. The right seat could be full time coding.
Remove the wrong people
“Wrong people” means wrong attitude or the wrong skills for your company’s needs.
You know who the wrong people are. They crop up negatively in conversations about team harmony and performance. If you keep talking about the same people you need to rip the plaster off and remove them.
I have never seen a successful Performance Improvement Plan. Don’t spend valuable time on the wrong people who are letting your company down.
Then start driving
With the right people in the right seats, the team is set up for success.
Now start driving i.e. decide strategy.
If unsure which road to take, confront the facts with brutal honesty. Determine if we could be the best coach on the road.
Quickly recognising you have the wrong strategy is challenging.
Say you run an accounting firm with the grand vision of being the next PWC. This is way too ambitious. It’s unachievable as a first step. A better strategy might be to be the best accounting firm for e-commerce companies with 10-50 employees. You could be #1 with that strategy.
Jim Collins set out this principle in his book Good to Great. Hear it from the man himself.