Building a Right Team from Scratch!

Building and ramping a team up is a gradual and progressive process. Building the right team is far-reaching if you haven’t thought through the entire process well. There is very little you can choose for, if you have to build a huge team within a very limited time.

There are 3 wider levers to building a team;

1. Core Values
2. Talent Hunt
3. Leading By Example

Core Values

As a leader it is critical to know what are the three key levers you will build the team on ; i.e.

1. Cultural Openness

2. Transparency

3. Equality

Cultural Openness

One of the primary reasons why some teams fail is due to lack of culture and cultural openness. A culture of openness means you encourage every single individual on the team to be open about the issues, challenges they face on a daily basis. A Culture of being open to hearing and encouraging their ideas and thoughts and truly caring about making it a reality.

Transparency

As a leader there are quite a lot of aspects you need to manage. One of the challenging tasks is being transparent to your team and share the right level of information. Being transparent about the current and future plans, situations makes people feel inclusive. Inclusivity makes your team feel special about themselves.

Equality

As a leader being neutral to gender, ethnicity & race is super important. Building a team on core values and finding the right talent is challenging but even more challenging is running the team without a bias. The opportunities should be provided equally to every individual without a preconceived bias.

Talent Hunt

The following are key levers while you are hunting for talent folks to be part of your team;

1. Attitude

2. Cultural fitment

Attitude and Cultural Fitment

Finding the person with right attitude is the most important and challenging task. Find a talent who say “I can do” “let’s solve this problem” “let’s do It”. Key aspect is finding and nurturing people with similar attitude. This world needs problem solvers NOT who constantly create or report problems.

Assessing a candidate for cultural fitment is not easy. The mantra really is to go by your’s and the company’s core values. Look out for people with varied skill sets and attitude but always check for cultural fitment.

Leading by Example

A lot has been said about working smart over working hard. Little has been said that both are equally important for a leader to inspire people to follow the same vision and goal. As a leader you are responsible to build, nurture and nourish the team with the above mentioned levers.

As a leader if you do not work hard in the initial days you will not gain the respect of the team. Remember, unless you lead from front to show how it’s done, people will follow their own ways of doing things which can be good and bad.

Hard work and smart work goes hand in glove and needs to be adopted as per situations. Not always smart work brings out efficacy.

Conclusion

If you are a newly appointed “leader”- the team you build is a lot of your reflection. It really depends on what levers you build the team with and how strongly you believe it in yourself. Ultimately the vision and goal for every individual is the same, only the roles differ.