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Finding the Right Talent Mix For Your Start-Up Enterprise

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A Mixture of Key Personality Traits

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For the entrepreneur, the early months of developing a start-up are some of the most hectic and arduous: you need to secure financing, explore legal limitations, and forecast your financials for the years ahead. You need to take your idea and turn it into a product or a service, along the way keeping a close attention to quality, profitability, and logistics. You may even need to start thinking about your personal financial future; you may want to open an IRA, for example, or conversely consider how much of your funds you can afford to allocate to the venture.

Amidst all of this commotion, moreover, you find yourself in the position to make one of the most important decisions a new business can make – the decision of hiring employees, in the process surrounding yourself with the best talent possible designed to help your start-up grow.

While different businesses and different industries have a wide variety of talent needs, the most successful start-ups usually share several commonalities. They possess drive, motivated individuals. They hire people who are truly passionate about their work. And they assemble a diverse mixture of several key personality traits and personal attributes.

That last point is an oft-overlooked one. Unlike Abraham Lincoln, who assembled a “Team of Rivals” in his Cabinet in order to maximize diversity and individual talents, few entrepreneurs hire their start-up team with such an outlook in mind. Don’t make this mistake if you’re starting a business, or plan to do so in the future. Instead, look to creative a mixture of the most important personality traits and personal attributes necessary to get a new company up and running. I believe that the most important of these are charisma, having a mathematical mind, creativity, and possessing the ability to network. Here’s a quick breakdown:

  1. Charisma: This person can be the face of your start-up and an excellent salesperson.
  2. Mathematical Mind: This person can oversee your budgets and all your financials. A good start-up doesn’t need a full accounting department – just one talented employee.
  3. Creativity: Whatever your product, this person is the one best equipped to turn it from an idea into a reality. They should be incredibly hard-working and driven.
  4. Ability to Network: Along with our charismatic leader, this employee has strong inter-personal skills. However, they operate more behind the scenes and use their connections and networking abilities to market the business and secure investors.

While you certainly may possess one of these traits, don’t lull yourself into thinking that you could do all of them better than a team of specialists can. To this end you want to diversify as you seek quality talent; even if you don’t end up with a team exactly like the one above, insure that a variety of strengths and capabilities are exhibited in your force. Your start-up’s long-term prospects will be much rosier as a result.

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Author’s Bio:
Alex S. writes about education and business at theeducationupdate.com

Thank you, Alex!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Break the Conspiracy to Build a Peak Performing Team in 2012

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Don’t Be Led Astray By the Conspiracy of the Team Player

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I’ve been thinking about the concept of the “team player” and the one time I had the outstanding pleasure of playing on a true team that built a business. I built a team or two and saw them dismantled by situations that undermined and contradicted true collaboration.

Why is that we do so much talking about being part of “the team,” when the underlying message is something different?

Think about it.
We learned to walk, talk, eat without benefit of a team.
No team could teach me to balance a bike or tread water to save my life.
Anyone who’s tried to pass on their experience at any of those skills knows that we learn them individually.

At school, we get individual report cards.
We get graded or assessed on our own performance.
We’re not supposed to share our homework.
We graduate as one person.
Our job applications are about what we as individuals have done.

We get hired alone.
We get raises and reprimands on our own.
We get an individual performance appraisal — it might speak to our team’s performance, but the rest of the team isn’t in the room.

And when we get fired, “the team” is told not to talk to us.

Where’s the team in all of that? What is a team anyway?

How to Break the Conspiracy of the Team Player to Build a Peak Performing 2012 Team

It’s a conspiracy that we ask people to be team players in situations that don’t offer a team. To break the conspiracy, we have to shift our thoughts to the community that is the team by valuing their contribution more than their job roles.

A true team is a group of people with complimentary skills who coordinate, delegate, and collaborate in ways that enable each person to invest peak performance moving the team forward to it’s highest goals. Great teams, like great leaders, are self-aware in that they know what each person should be doing more of and what each person should be doing less of — how each person contributes to the strongest team. When the team loses or adds a team member the team looks to fill a skill set that the team needs to be even stronger at what they do. Leadership is a quality shared by every team member no matter the level or area of expertise.

How do you get to a team like that?

  1. Hire leaders who share your values. Look for self-aware people who know their skills and have their ego intact. Leaders want to build something they can’t build alone. People who share your values will choose the same decisions as you will.
  2. Hire to the team. Don’t hire individuals. Hire one high performer and determine the key area at which he or she excels in his or her given job role and focus that role to take advantage of that. Then look for the additional skills in your next hires. In other words, adjust the job descriptions to enhance the performance of the best talent you find.
  3. Build out the team the same way. When a someone leaves the team, pull out the existing job description and have the team compare it to their own existing skill sets. What skills on that description are already covered well by two or more people on the team? Rewrite the new description to balance what you’ve got. For example if your marketing person leaves team and everyone on the team is social business savvy, write the new job description to find someone who “gets” social, but “lives” marketing data and analytics.
  4. Expect true team behavior and incentivize it. Lay out your goals and hold a quarterly appraisal for team performance that is tied to earnings. Move the team to solve their own problems ciollaboratively in the same the build their budgets and strategies. High performing teams thrive when they have
    • common goals — an agreement to work to achieve the same mission.
    • open communication — honest sharing of information that allows the team to move things forward efficiently
    • shared values — an agreement on what defines the standards of good behavior and good work
    • commitment to the group — every member inextricably bound to the team’s success
    • processes that support a culture of teamwork — the focus is on great performers who attract and nurture other great performers, because they’re truly fans of great performing teams.

    5. If it’s your goal to build a true team, trust the great performers you already have to help you start.
    Be a fan of great performers who are fans of great performers. Ask them what they need to perform at their peak and give them as much of that as you can. Constantly remove roadblocks and keep finding ways that they can do more of what they do well and less of what they do only adequately. Encourage everyone to notice others’ strongest skills and how the team might better use them..

    How will you break the conspiracy of the team player to build a peak performing team in 2012?

    Be irresistible.
    –ME “Liz” Strauss
    Work with Liz on your business!!

Would You Rather Have a Guardian Angel or a Devil’s Advocate on Your Team?

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We All Need A Check on Our Thinking

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We’re in a meeting. A problem gets set on the table. We start to brainstorm solutions. Ideas are forming. You find one that seems to have potential. It looks to be simple, timely, and meaningful. Just as you’re sketching it out, someone who’s been listening jumps in before your thought’s even finished to say, “Let me play Devil’s Advocate … ”

Once upon a time — in the 16th Century — the role of Devil’s Advocate was an appointment with a specific purpose to test the argument of elevating a person’s life to sainthood.

Today, we flattened the idea, stretched the usage, and made it all but frivolous. As Tim Sanders so aptly describes …

Today, we’ve taken this to the extreme. When someone at work has a new idea about a product or a process, we take on the role of devil’s advocate before they’ve even expressed half the idea. We treat them like idiots, posing objections to them in a tone of voice that suggests, “have you even considered the obvious?” We do the same thing at home. Our kid has an idea for a business and we go into skeptic mode, shooting down her enthusiasm before the food hits the table. In every situation, we don’t improve the way the ideator thinks. Research suggests that only authentic dissent (You truly think it’s a bad idea) can provoke a better idea. When you argue for the sake of argument, you merely bolster the ideator’s conviction as well as her feelings that she’s all alone on this one.

I’m convinced that the Devil’s Advocate takes more value than he or she adds.

Why a Guardian Angel Adds More Value Than a Devil’s Advocate

When you pose your next idea, would you rather have a Guardian Angel or a Devil’s Advocate?

That might seem a clever turn of a phrase, but it’s more than that. The difference is striking. One works to win an argument. The works to contribute. Take a look at the two.

A Devil’s Advocate …

The position of Devil’s Advocate is inherently negative. The role is to find holes in the proposed idea. Arguing for the sake of arguing easily can degrade into arguing for inconsequential details or arguing to show how clever the person presenting the argument can be.

  • Psychologically sits on the opposite side of the table.
  • Argues against whatever has been proposed.
  • Asks questions to focus on risks and problems.
  • Bears no responsibility for finding answers to those questions.
  • Has a vested reason to ignore or discount valid counter-arguments.

The Devil’s Advocate breaks ideas. No value is added.

A Guardian Angel …

The position of Guardian Angel is inherently positive. The role is to find and fill holes in the proposed idea. Arguing for the possibility of what might work, while checking for risk, leads to dialogue that builds and molds ideas into useful realities.

  • Psychologically sits on the same side of the table.
  • Argues for the goal or outcome the idea proposes to meet.
  • Asks questions to focus on meaningful solutions with low risk.
  • Bears responsibility for finding answers to those questions as part of the team.
  • Has a vested reason to build on the idea or propose a better one.

The Guardian Angel strengthens ideas by adding value to them.

A Devil’s Advocate wants to save the business from harm. He or she deconstructs to identify anything that might go wrong. The quest is to stop a problem before something is lost.

A Guardian Angel wants to meet and exceed the dreams of the business and the customers. He or she deconstructs to find and fix the anything that might go wrong. It’s a quest to invent a new solution so that new ground can be won.

The Guardian Angel adds value. A Devil’s Advocate tries to ensure none is lost.
Which would you rather have on your team?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Get Your Leadership ON … Before You Get Folks “on the Bus”

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10-Point Plan: Building a Team

Bringing Irresistible High Performers Into Your Brand

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Whether you’re a solopreneur in Ladd, Illinois or a C-suite executive at a Fortune 100 corporation, leadership — building a business — means you aren’t doing what you’re doing alone. It’s tried, true, and almost tired wisdom that getting the right folks on the bus is the first step in the process of building a great business. Every advocate of Jim Collins knows that you need the right team to take a business from good to great.

Seems simple. Enlist a great team and win.

Yet when the time comes to get other folks to board the bus, we can so get busy filling seats, much that we could consider about who joins us is left back on the curb long after the bus has already taken off.

In a strange way, we sometimes don’t let our leadership kick in fully until we see a team in front of us and at best that’s a little late. You see at the moment we need someone to help with our business, our brand, or our quest, we often get focused on the task we need with and lose sight of the person who will be doing the task.

Here’s how the process often works.

  • We have a job that needs doing. Someone has left the team or the business is growing and it’s time to add another someone to the group.
  • We determine the nature and scope of the tasks, the level of work, and the skills and time required to fill that gap.
  • We find an old job description. We edit that to construct a new one.
  • We share that new job notice with people who know great people and in places where appropriate candidates will see it and respond. Then we review submissions for experience and expertise.
  • We invite people to interview for the position and select the candidate we feel most likely to be qualified, committed to the work, and a good fit for the team.

Yet, a few months later we often find that we have a whiner, slacker, complainer, an under-performer, or a person who’s personality doesn’t fit the work or the people with whom that person regularly interacts. .

Somewhere between process and performance we’ve left a leadership gap.

Get Your Leadership On … Before You Build the Team

When I worked in publishing, I watched and worried over the variation in performance in freelancers and employees and from employee to employee. With some serious thinking and calculated tweaking, I found the process by which a person was enlisted could get the right people to stay with it to “get on the bus” and the bad fits to decide to pass on that opportunity. What it took was a willingness to go a little deeper – and to leave the “driver’s seat.”

It starts by shifting priorities from those of a boss or a manager to those of a leader building a team.

  • A great boss hires great employees who can get the work done.
  • A manager enlists great people who have the individual expertise and team skills to execute collaborative projects to successful outcome.
  • A leader attracts and chooses other great leaders who have the abilities, motivation, and complementary skills to become a team that can build something outstanding and lasting that no single member could build alone.

A leader spends more reflection on what’s missing and what’s needed to fill out the team — focusing strategically on a longer view and stronger growth rather than on the tactical response to a present need. A leader sets the standards higher. Leaders expand the thinking from not just what we need — someone to do a job — to what will attract true leaders who will grow with the company and even more than that fill in the gaps of the team.

With our leadership ON our priority becomes “all good people” to build the strongest team possible. And we apply that standard to every role that interacts with our team — employee, volunteer, vendor, partner, customer, friend. The key to “all good people” is to develop a process that attracts the kind of people we want and is such that the people who don’t want to be outstanding employees and volunteers just don’t come.

As I describe this leadership matrix, you’ll see how the process can do just that for you.

The Leadership Matrix for Choosing Outstanding Employees and Volunteers

Strauss Leadership Matriix for Choosing Winning Employees and Volunteers
Strauss Leadership Matriix for Choosing Winning Employees and Volunteers

Here’s how the process changes when we have our leadership on before we build the team:

  • We have a job that needs doing. Someone has left the team or the business is growing and it’s time to add another someone to the group.
  • Not just the job. We analyze the situation, conditions, and opportunities. We look first at the people currently doing those tasks. We ask those people what they could be doing more of and should be doing less of in order to be bringing their best game to the business.
  • Not just the expertise. We look for the expertise to that’s missing from the team. Some of what the current team could be doing less of to perform higher are tasks that they’ve outgrown. Some of what they could be doing less of are skills that aren’t their strengths. If we build a job description to the team, rather to the immediate set of tasks, we’ll gain new skill sets that aren’t currently available. For example, if the team is great at people skills, but weak on data skills, we can look for someone who also brings that.
  • We share that new job notice with people who know great people and in places where appropriate candidates will see it and respond.
  • Not just the desire or potential. We build a short-answer values and potential survey rather than a submission form. Each question might allow only 100 words. The questions might be …
    • What led you to apply for this position?
    • How do your values align with the values of our business?
    • How do you see your contribution in helping the business grow?
    • What in your life or work experience proves to you that we’d be successful working together?
    • How would you describe the optimal working relationship we might have now and moving forward?
  • We invite people to interview for the position and select the candidate we feel most likely to be qualified, committed to the work, and a good fit for the team.
  • During the interview, we introduce the candidate to the business, to members of the team, and to the employee or volunteer who last joined the business.
  • Not just a fit. We ask the newest employee or volunteer to assign the candidate a small task. The task might be writing a blog post or a proposal for a new idea. The task is chosen to fit the skills needed by the team. The newest team member is asked to give the candidate this slightly ambiguous guidance.
    • This is not a test. It’s so that we have something of a project nature to talk about.
    • It’s not expected that it will be a final, executable idea.
    • When you (the candidate) are ready, please call to set up a meeting to discuss what you bring.
  • Not just leadership. The candidates who set up meetings show up with a project and ready to share their thinking. . The meetings allow you and the team to discuss how the candidate makes decisions and what he or she valued in developing the meeting project.

The task sorts the candidates with leadership qualities, initiative, and motivation. Those who set up a return date are the ones can deal with ambiguity and have the ego strength to bring their ideas with clients and colleagues with confidence. The people who don’t want to invest or risk in that way sort themselves out of the process.

The meeting itself allows everyone — candidate and the team — to try on the fit and by discussing “real work.” The team can see the candidate’s ability to trust in him- or herself, the work, and the group comes out. The candidate can experience how the team discusses ideas and relates to each other as a group.

I used this process for 18+ years and only once did a candidate make who set up the meeting turn out to be one who didn’t belong on the bus. All of the others were high-performers who fit the team.

How do you get your leadership ON before you build a team?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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