Building and scaling great teams...

Building and scaling a high performing team is hard, and critically important to any fast-growing business. Over the years, I've had the privilege of building and scaling new teams, and I have learned what works and what doesn't work. My experience has given me good perspective on some core principles to keep in mind when building new teams and managing through rapid growth. Admittedly, this is a mix of art and science, and I expect to continue learning more in the years ahead. There is a plethora of articles and books about this topic, so there is a lot to learn. Below are 5 principles that have served me well, and I hope they can be useful to you as you build and scale your team(s)...

1/ Always start with hiring great (and diverse) talent

If you do one thing, hiring great and diverse talent is the most important thing you will do when building a high performing team. This is hugely important for any leader of any team of any size to get right. I cannot emphasize this enough. Hiring great talent has compounding effects that pays off both short-term for your team, and long-term for your company. Great talent enables you to empower your team (see below), move faster, and do more with less. When growing rapidly, a common mistake managers make is to hire quickly because they need people. This is absolutely the worst thing you can do. I've made this mistake before, and it was painful. It costs you 10x more time/resources to fix a bad hiring decision, not including the impact to team culture, brand, and moral. This also applies to pre-existing teams -- if you adopt a team, and the talent is poor, you must act swiftly. Some organizations make this easy (allow you to remove/change talent quickly), some organizations do not. Do what you can to drive out low performers and pull in top performers. As painful and disruptive as these changes seem short-term, it must be done, or you'll never scale effectively long-term.

2/ Orient your team around a mission and purpose

When building a new team, or overhauling an adopted team, establishing a clear mission and purpose is critical. Great talent wants to be challenged and make a big impact. Someone once told me, "when you hire lions, be ready to feed them". This is so true when hiring great talent. They are smart, ambitious, and hungry to solve big problems for the business. Therefore it's crucial to anchor great talent (see # 1 above) around a big problem and mission. The worst thing you can do is hire great people, then not given them a mission or problem to solve. They will become de-motivated, leave your team, and the culture will crumble. Once you've effectively outlined the the purpose/mission/goals, you can step back and let your talented team go to work (with your ongoing support, guidance, and coaching).

3/ Establish a short and simple list of success metrics

Once you've hired great people and given them a clear mission, the next step is to establish a short list of success metrics. Think is these as a "scoreboard" for your team. Your team wants to know they are "winning" and making incremental progress towards reaching your goals. Build management routines where you review these success metrics and progress, and routinely connect how your teams work is impacting the top-level goals of the business. Without success metrics and a constant reminder of progress, teams can quickly lose steam because they don't feel like they are contributing to the broader company mission. By establishing key metrics, and reviewing them regularly with your team, you'll be able to "feed the lions" and keep your team excited and motivated about their progress.

4/ Empower and support your team

If you've effectively hired, established a mission/purpose, and outlined clear metrics of success, now you can then quickly push decision making to the lowest levels of your organization. Doing this has a few key benefits. First, you build an environment where trust is strong and failure is acceptable. When your team sees you step back and ask them lead, their sense of accountability and ownership skyrockets. Second, it builds accountability and ownership on your team. When you encourage and enable your team to make decisions, they own the problem and act like a business owner. This is the magic you strive for in any team...where they own the problem, are fully accountable to solve it, and come to you for advice when needed. Thirdly, you're helping to build confidence in your team, which is ultimately helping to build a bench of future leaders for your business. Your top performers will lean in, own the problems, make mistakes, learn, and try again. Over time, you're building a team of talent that will feed into other parts of the organization or grow into your future leaders. Everyone wins when you trust and empower your team to lead.

5/ Evolve your org design again...and again

The only constant is change. That holds true for organizational design in rapidly growing businesses. The concept of a "org change" tends to have negative connotation, but its essential to maintain a healthy and productive organization. Ben Horowitz has a great blog on this topic, and I encourage you to read it. No team likes to give up scope of ownership. However, as a team and company grows, it's essential to specialize and segment your team around problems. In my experience, the concept of segmenting my team, creating specialized functions, and creating sub-teams was a difficult transition at first. Overtime, it enabled my team(s) to move faster, deepen their expertise, strengthen their purpose/ownership, and drive more efficiency for the business. A simple analogy is a sports team. Everyone has a specific position, and if everyone plays their position and executes as planned, you increase your chance to win. However, if everyone chases the ball -- similar to how 4 year old kids play soccer -- then you'll never be effective. Lastly, as you make organizational changes, the changes should be obvious to the team, and you should be explicit about why you're making changes. Don't leave any room for your team to wonder why you made the changes. Tell them exactly why, and remind them of two important rules: (1) No organizational design is perfect and (2) It will change again.

The framework for building and scaling teams has many important principles, and there is no single "play book" for doing this perfectly. However, the above 5 principles have served me well when I rigorously execute them. As I mentioned above, building and scaling great teams is hard. Nailing all 5 of the above is (in my opinion) the secret sauce, and if you miss a ingredient, things can fall apart. If your team is not performing to its fullest potential, use these 5 principles to try and diagnose the the issue (talent, mission, metrics, org design, etc). It really takes ongoing focus and execution of all 5 principles to get it right. When you get it right, its hugely rewarding!

I'd love to hear from you -- What are some effective tactics you've seen applied (as a member of a team) or used (as a leader of a team) when building and scaling teams?