I’ve had the privilege of working with thousands of groups over the years as they try to assemble their dream team. I’ve run huge organizations with huge teams, and I’ve run smaller places with fewer than a dozen employees. And it turns out that when building a team, size doesn’t matter. You can get it wrong with a handful of staff just as easily as you can get it right with a large one.
For many years now, I’ve been building our team here at Vanderbloemen, where we get paid to help thousands of other teams find their top talent (and build their dream team). The longer I do this, the more I realize that, except for casting vision, building a dream team should absolutely be the leader’s priority.
I’ve learned valuable lessons about the right and wrong way to assemble your best team. Most of these lessons I’ve learned the hard way: by making mistakes.
While experience is a powerful teacher, sometimes it’s nice to not have to suffer. Take it from me and learn these two fundamentals of teambuilding now, instead of through your own painful and costly experience.
1. Know yourself. And hire the opposite.
I am convinced that there may be nothing more important to building a dream team than knowing yourself. Here’s why.
Plato formed a lot of the basis for how the Western world thinks, but he never wrote anything down. The one thing he did commit to writing? “Know thyself.”
The best thing you can do when building your dream team is know who you are (and who you are not). As a young leader, I had an amazing chance to build out a dream team. I made four critical hires in the first year. All four were talented. All four have gone on to be successful. But all four were a mistake of a hire. Why? They were all like me.
I replicated that mistake several more times in hiring farther down the org chart. Then one day, we were all doing personality assessments as a team. When the session leader got to my personality type, most of the other people on the team were right there with me in the same section of the personality map. It was a visual reveal of my big mistake: I hired people that were like me.
I didn’t take the time to realize what I wasn’t good at, and then use that knowledge to build a team that excelled where I was weak. Why not? Probably because at 31 years old I was pretty sure I knew everything. But more fundamentally, I like me. Most of us like ourselves to some extent. And when we see someone like us, we’re irrationally drawn toward hiring them.
Smart leaders take the time to realize what they’re good at, and what they’re not good at. And then they build a team full of people that complement their strengths and shore up their weaknesses.
We’ve done this many ways in the last several years, but my current favorite is to have a chart of Patrick Lencinoi’s Working Genius plastered on the wall. People’s faces are in the sections of their working genius. It’s a quick and easy way to see where we have too much of one kind of person and too little of another. Whatever way works best for you, find a way to make sure you’re not just hiring yourself.
2. Know your organization. And hire for culture fit.
Building a team means building both for the present and for the future. But as my friend John Maxwell says, “If you’re leading and nobody is following, you’re not leading. You’re just taking a walk.”
For a long time, people have talked about the various C’s of hiring. Character, competency, chemistry, culture, and many others have been added to the list. For me, it starts and ends with culture.
You can teach a new hire skills to succeed in a role. And if you can find a way to teach culture and train it, good for you. Write a book about it. But every expert I’ve talked to over the years has told me culture fit is something that people either have or don’t.
When hiring, make sure you understand the culture of your team. Maybe take a look at our assessment for culture to start identifying your team’s values. When I wrote the book Culture Wins, we outlined a process for identifying those values. Now almost eight years later, about 10,000 organizations have taken the inventory, followed that roadmap and better understand what their culture is.
Knowing your culture gives people a huge lead in hiring. For instance, we value speed of responsiveness as a culture here at Vanderbloemen. There are plenty of super talented people that just don’t respond quickly. As skilled as they are, they would be miserable working for us.
So make sure you know exactly what your culture is for your team, and then hire around those habits when you’re interviewing candidates.
And finally, under the culture umbrella, I’d add another C to the list: “Change tolerance.”
This is critical to building for the future. You must understand the change tolerance your organization can take.
Have you taken time to study how much change your organization can take at once? It’s different for everyone. Only you will be able to judge how much change can happen at the time that you’re hiring. Additionally, look at the most successful hires in the history of your organization. See what’s worked before. See what it looked like it would work and didn’t. Study your organization, where it is, how stressed it currently is, and how prepared it is for a big step in a new direction. That will keep you from hiring a really talented person that brings in too much change at once and wrecks your dream team.
Anyone can build a team. But the best leaders build teams upon a foundation of knowledge, both of themselves and their culture. When you have this foundation, you can be confident that your team will be able to see your organization through challenges while growing and thriving for years to come.
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