While small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy and our culture across America, no entrepreneur can do it successfully alone – at least not for long. We all need a corps of team members who are able to work together, innovate together, thrive together and take our companies to the next level. You can’t work on your business if you’re constantly working in your business.
So how do you build “the right” team? And how to do you keep their momentum moving forward in a world where you might not be doing the same teambuilding activities and department lunches you were doing before? And did those activities even truly make a difference? The good news is that we’ve all found ways to work through the location barriers in a variety of ways and the better news is that, if you build the right team, it doesn’t matter where they are located or whether you can take them to lunch.
It all starts with understanding your team members. What drives them? What motivates them? How do they prefer to work? What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How can you build out company teams that help everyone and your company to succeed? And, perhaps most importantly, how can you do all of this as a small business without the human resources team of a large company?
Building the right team is about so much more than behavioral analysis and personality tests. You have to have someone on your side who understands the data and someone who can help you put that data to good use as part of your teambuilding process. That’s why we built our GC Insights program. Sometimes it’s a matter of hiring the right person, but if you’ve already hired and trained a few standout individual employees, it means giving them the right jobs, offering them the right training, putting them on the right team and giving them an opportunity to grow. We can help you get there.
More importantly, building the right teams, training managers and delegating is how you get out of the day-to-day of your business so you can grow your company and enjoy your life.
Let’s explore an example: Kellie owns a marketing company with 12 employees. It’s a small business, but they are doing good work, their clients are coming back and they are on a strong growth trajectory. However, Kellie has a hard time letting go over creating every marketing plan. Is it because she’s passionate about marketing plans? Or has she not built a team she can trust to do that work on their own? And if she micromanages every part of the process, her strongest employees are going to quit and – possibly – start their own firms. If she can create and train a team she trusts to work on their own, she can be out working on getting clients, focusing on branding and recruiting new talent. She can also take a vacation without checking her email every day. It’s not just about building a great team – it’s about building a great team that works seamlessly toward the growth of your business.
