Teambuilding: Who should be on your dream team
Everyone wants people on their team who match their level of passion. Passion when combined with knowledge serves better. Just like funding, your team will change at each phase of growth.
"Your first team is you. Never forget it."
Next, brass tacks. In my experience, you need a great administrator. There will be a lot of details that need attending to. Get yourself an ally who loves the minutia. My experience of visionaries is they often eschew the small stuff.
Mentors and or industry consultants for each area of the business can help you understand the whole playground. With greater understanding of the playground comes deeper understanding of the team you need. Odds are, you’ll need all kinds of allies. The day-to-day requirements of building and managing requires all hands on deck, including you, and requires all hands to get dirty, including yours.
The key to successful execution of your idea will be people. It will mean employee engagement...a bit more than simple involvement. It will mean a corporate culture that allows everyone to feel invested and passionate about delivering the idea. Don’t be afraid to change team members that don’t align with the culture you want to build, especially in early phases. Expect to have team members turnover. It’s easy to become complacent with team members that don’t perform.
The hard half of the job will be the days you need to remove people. You have the responsibility to create an inclusive culture where team members get the support they need. There’s a good saying: surround yourself with people smarter than yourself. Always a good bet.
PASS ME A PAPER CLIP
It might seem self-evident that the quality of people in a business dictate the quality of the business. Yet every day in businesses large and small, untold thousands—millions—of group interactions take place that fail to bring a business closer to its goals.
In many cases groups meet, interact, then part, no closer to achieving their objectives than when they started. This tide of unproductive and ineffective group interactions has a massive cost: it drains the global economy of billions of dollars a year, strangles creativity and initiative, and results in many businesses, divisions, departments, projects, groups, and teams stalling out long before they’ve even begun to realize their full potential.
On an individual level, the cost of group dysfunction is just as high:
“it generates inordinate levels of stress, demoralizes entire workforces, and demotivates otherwise high-performing people who would rather take a paper clip, straighten it out, and stab it in their eye than sit through another interminable,” — The Synergist: How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success by Les McKeown https://a.co/d799xTR
When developing your business idea, consider your business/personal style. How will this influence your corporate culture?
Do you have to be the smart one in the room? Tell me in the comments - or when we meet in my next interactive online workshop.
An interesting read for you: The Real Amazon Question: Can Amazon Retain A Day One Culture When The Only Person From Day One Departs?
ATHENA's Ed.Note: Desiree, our Co-Founder, has been at the forefront of legacy conversations around all things melanin for over 2 decades. She was there from Day One of IMAN Cosmetics for 25 years, and was principally the one who managed multiple teams over more than 2 decades. Desiree's hands-on experiences can be contextualized in Thinking 360 - An Interactive Insightful Workshop from March 23 2021.
