Business Growth Tip: How to Build a World Class Team

How good is your business’s team? Are the people on it the best that you could wish for, given the resources at your disposal? Have they caught your vision, taken it to heart, and attacked the tasks in front of them with the same sort of verve that it fires up in you?

Do you even have a team?

That’s a lot of questions to begin an article with. But they are all worth asking. If you don’t get your hiring right, your company will suffer for it.

If your employees are driven and determined to grow in the roles they play at your establishment, the sections they’re responsible for will grow as well. And if this is the attitude of most people you work with, the cumulative effect of their approach to their responsibilities will help your business climb up the success ladder.

But what if you’re still operating on the micro-scale, as a solopreneur just trying to get your enterprise off the ground? Is this team-building thing your cup of tea right now?

When Should You Build a Team?

Here are a few things that might tell you whether (or when) it’s time to start hiring people to fill roles at your business.

1. If You Can’t Handle All the Work Anymore

Do you find that you’re constantly overwhelmed by the orders you’re getting from clients? If this is the case, you may want to consider bringing on someone you could delegate some of that responsibility to.

Let’s say your business relies a lot on social media for publicity and bringing clients in. You’ve tried social media scheduling tools, but you find that you can’t even sneak in time to engage with comments on your pages. This might mean that you should seek the services of a social media manager.

In general, there’s always the option of outsourcing some of these overflows and extra duties to impendent persons. We’ll touch on this in the next point.

2. When Outsourcing isn’t a Better Option

Sometimes, even sharing some of your work with an independent contractor might not be as good an option as keeping it in-house. This might be true for ‘core’ roles, which are at the heart of what your company does. For instance, a beverage producer wouldn’t want to ship out some of their ingredient mixing to another business, especially if they don’t want their product formula leaked to possible competitors. 

When you’re pressed by all the extra work that’s coming in and you think you’d be better off having it done within your business, it’ll be a good idea to have more people working with you.

3. You Can Do More with Complementary Skills

It takes more than just a brilliant software engineer to build a tech startup. That’s because tech startups don’t just function in a ‘tech space’. They serve specific markets with varying realities and needs. They often require unique skill sets and niche-specific knowledge to serve these markets effectively.

Marketing tends to be a widely talked about complementary skill among startup co-founders. This is because a lot of them realize that they need smart marketing people to tell their story to the world in ways that attract customers and investors.

In a nutshell, if you know that your business demands more than your training and experience can give to make it grow, you should consider partnering with people who can make up for your deficiencies in those areas.

4. You Want to Grow Faster

Again, we’ll refer to startups, which tend to adopt a sped-up growth model. They want to scale fast, so they seek funding that allows them to hire more people to get more work done.

Even if your business doesn’t fall in the category of a startup, you may still want to move your company at a faster pace. Expanding your staff numbers can certainly bring you closer to achieving your aim. Just be sure that you are able to cover the costs associated with this expansion for the time that it takes to recoup your investment in it.

5. If You Can’t Start Any Smaller

Some businesses can’t start off properly with just one person running things. Television stations and cinemas are examples.

How Should You Build a Team?

Here’s how you should go about building a team.

1. Take Your Time

We have already noted how important your hiring is. The quality of employees you snap up will determine the degree to which you’re able to achieve your company’s aims. So you’ll want to take your time about the hiring process.

Research the positions that you’d like to fill. Find out what qualifications and character traits are the best fit for those positions, and watch out for them when you request for, receive, and review applications for those roles. Don’t be quick to drop the bar just because you can’t find enough people with the right traits. Extend the timeframe for receiving applications if that’s what you need to do.

2. Be Particular about Trustworthiness and Devotion

Apart from skill levels, also check for the trustworthiness of potential and new hires. This is why some companies prefer to take people on for a while and watch their attitude to work and how well they fit with the organizational culture before deciding whether to employ them full time or let them go.

3. Invite Skilled Friends to Join You

What could be better than having your friends as part of your team, especially if they’re capable of filling the role you want them to take on? You already have an existing relationship with them, so you may not have to go through the familiarization process.

There could be a downside to this. Familiarity may be as much a problem as it is an advantage. If your friends could take your venture lightly and fail to approach it with the sort of professionalism that it demands, you will have to define the bounds of your business dealings with them from the start so that your enterprise doesn’t suffer in the end.

4. Try Remote Workers

Having some of your employees work from a location they choose (say, their homes) could save you a substantial amount in extra expenses. If you are concerned about ensuring that they get their jobs done, you can set output quotas for them which you will have them meet within specific time limits (say daily, weekly, or monthly).

5. Exude Passion for Your Vision

Unless you act like your business goals are important to you, your employees will have no inkling that you’re serious about them. Walk the talk, demand that they follow suit, and they will. If some show a persistent reluctance to work in this light, you may have to replace them with people who are more eager to do so.

6. Have Regular Orientation Sessions and Training 

As you build a value-driven, goal-oriented company, you will want to ensure that your staff gets on board with what you’re aiming to achieve.   You can do this by organizing orientation sessions for new employees and persons who have been with your business for a while.

Orientation sessions should be geared towards bringing your values and goals back into focus; training should help sharpen and update the skills your workers will need to reach those goals.   

7. Work Towards Achieving Periodic Targets

We mentioned this when we referred to remote working. But it’s not just remote workers who should be bound to time-specific targets. Assigning and scheduling duties and setting deadlines for their completion will enable you to evaluate your employees’ performance and see how they’re contributing to your company’s growth.

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• The 7 Consumer Behaviours Shaping the Nigerian Market
• How to Win Your Distribution Game as a Tech Startup

ikenna-nwachukwu

Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.

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