Secret Every Entrepreneur To Build A Successful Team

Start-ups and entrepreneurial ventures cannot sustain for long, in the absence of the right team. This basically means that an entrepreneur not only needs to invest his time and money into getting employees to work in the start-up phase and later, but he also needs to get the right people on board.

One of the top reasons behind start-up failures is the absence of the right team.

About 23% of entrepreneurial ventures fade away because the entrepreneur could not find the right team to work with him.

Entrepreneurs are futuristic people who have innovative and forward-thinking ideas and concepts that they translate into operational business ventures. But their job does not end here. It is just the beginning. Having a great idea is not going to suffice. The entrepreneur needs to invest in team building to reap the fruits of his labor. Remember that start-ups are challenging and working for one can be grueling. It requires great deal of perseverance and hard toil to start seeing sales and revenues coming in. The journey from the start till this point is no way easy and as an entrepreneur you need to ensure that you have the right people with the right competencies to work in your team.

Here are few strategic and practical ways to get the right team inboard:

Map your organizational requirement and architecture with job roles

This simply means that you need to divide the entire recruitment activity into smart phases. First dissect your organizational setup to understand what job roles need to be filled up in the first phase. These are the functionalities that are crucial and critical and must be filled up for survival sake- for infusing your business with life. Sustenance is in the second phase where you go further and expand the team. Typically, there could be multiple departments in an organization. What you need to see is if your business needs to have all departments in one go or can you start slowing with first focusing on the basic ones to be filled up.

Invest your time in team building

Team building is not only about getting salaried and contractual people to work for you; it embodies a lot more in terms of the kind of respect and regard you give to each person as individuals, the kind of job responsibilities they have been entrusted with, ensuring that their core competencies have been rightly matched with their key responsibilities, that these employees are motivated to come to work each day and that they are enthusiastic to contribute to their work in the most effective manner. One very important aspect of team building is to focus on communication. When communication channels are open, honest and transparent, it can instill and enhance the confidence levels in individual employees. Working for start-ups can be mentally and physically taxing. Keeping communication balanced and open can help your team work with greater productivity and focus.

Ensure that you pick the people with the right approach and attitude

Most entrepreneurs would want to do this but often fail to understand how to go about. You have two ways to do this – either recruit a performance-savvy HR manager or outsource the work to a reputed HR agency. With modern technology, there are ways and methods to check for compatibility along with competency and skills of candidates during the interview process. There are numerous psychometric and personality tests that can be employed to understand if a recruit is the right fit to your team. The point is that by recruiting the wrong person you are going to waste more time and money than by waiting for the right fit to come by.

Team engagement is equally important

Go beyond the demands of the daily grind to know more about your team and individual members. It helps in creating a compassionate image of you in front of your people. Indulge your team from time to time – organize casual Friday lunches or weekend get-together helping team members to bond among themselves as well as with you. Team engagement also means that you help your team understand that you want them to progress and grow in their career and life. Through training and workshops, you provide them with the opportunity to learn new skills and upgrade their existing know-how. Organizing offsite, corporate family day out and other such activities help strengthen the collaborative bonding of your team, also instilling a positive and lively work culture. 

Learn from failures and celebrate the successes together

You fail as a team and you win as a team. This is ideally how the work culture should be. Yes, individual responsibilities and productivity are important because they finally affect the overall business performance. But, the best way to keep everyone together and committed to a greater cause is to deliberate the failures together and take the learning from it as a team, instead of pinpointing and blaming a X or a Y. Similarly, when it is time to celebrate, let it be out in the open, together so that each team member can feel the joy of good performance. Yes, you can publicly appreciate and accolade the people who have done the best or have performed extraordinarily but give everybody the chance to feel that they have had a role to play in the success.

Be the ideal leader

Leadership can play a major role in team building. It’s okay if you are not the ideal leader but you can try to be one for sure. The better leader you are, the better will be the motivation levels of your team. The higher the motivation levels, the more charged-up they would be to give their best. If you are ready to give your entrepreneurship a fair chance to grow and sustain, your people will be equally inspired and enthusiastic. The moment you despair, indulge in preferential treatment and get into negativeness, the team that you built with so much care and detailing will shred away into tatters in no time.

ALSO READ

5 Steps to Successful Team Coordination