How to create a winning team for your business

Building a super team in any organisation is an art. You have to be instinctive about people and how to manage them.

You have to master how to bring out the best out of every member of your team. But there’s also science involved in building a strong team. The methodology should ensure only the right people are brought onto the team.

Brad Smart, a management consultant, who helped General Electric with its hiring practices in the 1980s and 1990s created a process known as Topgrading.

According to the system, the estimated cost of a bad hire — which includes resources allocated toward recruiting, training, client and employee dissatisfaction among others — can range from five to 27 times the amount of the person’s actual salary.

In addition, allowing the wrong people to slip through the hiring process will quickly ruin your company culture. Smart believed that it is better to leave a position vacant than fill it with the wrong person.

That idea runs contrary to popular management beliefs that suggest you should fill a position as quickly as possible to avoid overworking other team members.

With that in mind, let’s explore a few effective tips for ensuring you only add the best people to your team:

Make use of referrals

Before you even invite somebody in for an interview, you must take the first step. Inquire whether any current A player in the organisation, as well as A player in our networks, have any referrals.

The Topgrading system strongly favours candidates who come in through referrals since they have a considerably greater success percentage within organisations.

This is due to two factors. A player would not risk ruining his or her brand by giving a poor recommendation, nor would he or she place himself or herself in a situation where he or she would have to pick up the slack for a reference who turned out to be a B or C player.

Second, your existing team members already understand what will be expected of the candidate once in position – sometimes even more clearly than recruiters. They will recommend candidates whose skills and capabilities they’re confident in.

Use scorecards when recruiting

The interview process is the most important in finding the right candidate for an open position – so make the most of it.

One of the best ways to do that is by using detailed scorecards to keep track of each candidate’s skills, experience, and suitability for the open position.

Many of us have unconscious prejudices that may influence who we select during the interview process. Many interviewers claim usually they saw a candidate’s talent if he or she ends up being successful.

However, when a candidate fails, everybody claims that they were skeptical about hiring them. To paraphrase a well-worn adage, success has many fathers, whereas failure is an orphan.

In addition, selective memory makes it difficult for us to precisely recall our impressions of applicants at the time we interviewed them, making it difficult to learn about our biases and accurately judge our interviewing skills.

That is why scorecards are so useful. They can help us overcome biases and have a better memory of our impressions of job applicants. A scorecard should be similar to the job description – but more in-depth.

It can improve your interview hit rate and your organisation’s return on human capital investment over time. A quantitative interview scorecard helps you evaluate candidates’ credentials and suitability and compare interview-based forecasts with later job performance.

Don’t overlook the candidate’s values and ideals

It’s easy to focus on a candidate’s skills and experience. But it’s also important to get someone who shares your company’s values – someone who will fit naturally into your company culture. When new hires’ personal values align with the company culture, they can feel happier and be more fulfilled in the role – which means they will be more productive in the long run.

It can be difficult to tell how well a candidate will fit into the day-to-day workings of a business. However, by using a value-based hiring strategy, you can significantly improve the likelihood of finding a cultural fit.

Values-based hiring prioritises specific values, beliefs and aspirations when attracting, hiring and promoting individuals. By focusing on specific core values, companies can build a team comprised of the right people for each position – creating a team that works like a well-oiled machine.

By focusing on hiring based on values, you can create a positive work environment, improve staff morale and engagement, and increase productivity. In addition, value-based recruitment will decrease employee turnover rates.

Support risk-taking

As long as you have established the rules of the game, encourage members of your team to be creative and innovative. Progress is achieved by trying new things, even if that means experiencing some failures along the way.

As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Adopt the same approach in your business and encourage employees to do the same.

People must be allowed to attempt new things and make errors to reach their full potential. Allowing creativity and innovation to flourish is the best way to push your team to new heights.

Fear of mistakes and failure must go for your team to be a successful one. When you and your team embrace risk-taking, you’ll be rewarded with synergy in your team and your business. That said, taking risks only works once you’ve got strong leadership, shared goals, and rules in place.