Building a Great Procurement Team

Finding, developing and retaining talented individuals who can deliver exceptional value is the most important thing a procurement leader does.

They must be technically good, have excellent soft skills, be innovative, exceptionally driven and willing to always go the extra mile.

In short, you must find the top 1% of the profession.

And then build a whole team of them. And keep hold of them.

No mean feat.

So what are the five areas we need to consider to build an exceptional team?

Cast a wide net

How do we find the right people for our mission? By casting a wide net.

We must look beyond the traditional resource pools and out into the business, and look to other teams for people with the right attitude.

Other commercial functions will have the right grounding, and having an external perspective is important to bring diversity of thought into our function.

By sharing the procurement strategy and mission around your business, you attract people who want to deliver something exceptional.

In the marketplace, having a strong team brand is vital as this will attract high performers who want to come and work for you. Have a reputation as an innovative, forward thinking team that is hard-working and gets things done.

Encourage your wider business and marketing functions to share content on LinkedIn about the Procurement Team and the career path within it. Showing that people can be developed quickly is a great way to attract ambitious procurement talent.

Similarly, make sure your leadership team are also posting regularly on LinkedIn, blogging, and taking part in Podcasts to get the message out about what it’s like to work in your team.

Encourage the whole team to recommend trusted colleagues that people have worked with before, but make sure you are also looking outside to new talent from diverse backgrounds.

Every day is a school day

Motivated people will be eager to learn as they are naturally curious and passionate about self development. But giving these people all the time and fostering the culture of continuous learning is the leaders responsibility.

Set up a mentorship program to ensure that leaders are able to develop the team outside of a formal line management capacity and consider reverse mentoring where the less experienced members of the team support leaders with newer concepts, such as technology, diversity, ESG, and highlighting gender and race unconscious bias.

Encourage innovation, creativity and experimentation and celebrate failure so everyone is able to learn from it. Allowing part of the working week for training development and innovation ensures that it is given time when it may otherwise be deprioritised.

Help junior members take on larger project. This is another way of making the best of opportunities to learn and gives exposure to senior stakeholders. It could be strategic procurement projects or ownership of an improvement project - empowerment helps great people shine.

Everyone on the mission

Having a clear mission that everyone is brought into and committed to is the best way of motivating the whole team.

Everyone must understand what it is that they must deliver in order to the mission to be successful.

By communicating openly and regularly about goals, challenges and progress towards the mission, leaders ensure that it remains front of mind. Setting aggressive timescales to deliver elements of the strategy will drive high performers to deliver. Be aware of setting longer timescales for delivery - it's better to miss an aggressive timescale then to miss a generous one.

Take time as a team, offsite and away from the day to day, to share progress on the mission and to bond over team building exercises. You can incorporate learning and development activities into these offsite sessions as well to make the most of the time.

Be open with your business about what you are doing to ensure that individuals are not contacted during this time and can focus.

Empower the team.

Empower your team by giving them autonomy to make decisions and ultimately make mistakes to support their personal growth. Encourage innovation new ways of thinking and simplification of processes.

Your team must have access to the right systems, templates, process documents, and L&D resources.

It's your role to ensure your team have got what they need and then to get out of their way so they can deliver to the best of their ability. Leadership should be more of a coaching exercise than a management one.

Encouraging candid feedback between the team - both from leaders to team members, and from team members to leaders - is another way of ensuring that we learn as quickly as possible and understand when and where we are going right or wrong.

Minimising governance requirements to only the most important areas is another way of ensuring your team spends the most time on value adding activities rather than on paperwork. High performers are not always the best at getting their paperwork done - but will be focussed on achieving results.

Keep your best people

Your team must have a clear career path and objectives, ideally in the OKR format of their Objectives and the Key Results you expect them to achieve. These should be aligned with your companies overall strategy and the procurement strategy.

Having a clear career pathway is a must, as exceptional people want to develop quickly and by seeing the road ahead of them will be motivated to deliver exceptional results.

Regular recognition and rewards are also important. This could be a small as a mention in a team meeting, an email to say thank you for a good project delivered or paying for a meal at a restaurant following a great delivery.

I still remember leaders doing this for me 15 years ago, which shows how much it means to your team members. Do not underestimate this one.

Fostering a healthy work life balance is also important. Whilst high performers will often be in the office, meeting stakeholders, meeting suppliers or on the road, they also need time to work at home and spend time with their families if they are to avoid burning out.

Choosing one day a week, a fortnight or a month to spend time together as a team is important so best practice can be shared and for team spirit to develop. However, autonomy to choose how the individual spends the rest of their time is a must. High-performance do not like the idea of being micromanaged and need to be empowered to manage their own time effectively.

Reward outputs rather than inputs.

How do you attract and retain great people?