Building for Success - Team Empowerment

In my recent LinkedIn articles, I’ve been share some excerpts from my new book “The Startup Handbook – A Founder’s Guide to Building a Business”.

If you’d like to read my thoughts so far, then here are the links to the articles:

• Building a successful team – defining and justifying the attributes when hiring
• Putting clients at the centre of your business – for a successful business
• Focusing on diversity – and how it brings great richness to your business
• Company culture – and the importance of getting buy-in from your team
• Strategic goals – and how it is critical to align your team around them

Today I want to focus on team empowerment.

Empower Your Team to Grow

In a previous article I talked about the importance of bringing in the right people to your business as you grow and how to do that by being deliberate about the attributes that you’re looking for. No business, however big wants to invest time and money on recruiting someone that ultimately isn’t right for a role. In a startup or early stage business, you simply can’t afford to make that mistake.

However, bringing in the perfect person and then investing in their training and knowledge is only the start of building a successful team. People also want to see career development and progression. That might be in the form of promotions and greater responsibility or simply in opportunities to learn new skills.

When you’re a small and growing business, there are always a plethora of opportunities for your team when it comes to learning new skills and trying their hand at different roles. The simplest example of this is, if you grow rapidly, you will need some of your team to become managers of others and to lead a team in their own right.

When this happens, you have two choices:

• Promote from within
• Externally hire a manager

My strong preference—even when nobody in the team has managerial experience or the certain skills in the matrix that you want in the ideal manager—is to choose the former and promote from within.

There are four benefits of this:

1. By choosing to look within the existing team, you are showing that you value the skills and the knowledge that being developed.
2. By promoting from within, you are showing your team that there is a career path that exists beyond the roles they’re currently doing.
3. By empowering one of your team to reach beyond their role and stretch themselves, you are showing that you believe in them.
4. By raising up someone who has been successful within the existing business, you can ensure that the new manager is a cultural fit for the company. Not something to take lightly.

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These four things will reap dividends in the long term from the perspective of culture, loyalty, retention, and morale.

On top of this, I have always been acutely aware of the message that hiring externally gives to the team. From their perspective, an outsider has been parachuted in above them, curbing their opportunities for promotion and devaluing the skills they have learned in their role.

Of course, there are times when you need particular skills or experience that don’t exist within the team and you have to look externally. However, when it’s not absolutely necessary, I would counsel anyone to strongly consider whether an existing team member with less experience can be given the opportunity to do the job. I would never value more experience over a known cultural fit.

In RFI we always made a point of putting members of our team into positions of responsibility that they would not have been exposed to in other companies until much later in their career, and we saw all the benefits that I have mentioned above.

As a result of this policy, we had many people who stayed with the company for over a decade. I know that this is not because we paid more than other firms—we simply couldn’t. I believe it is because we showed faith in them from very early on in their careers, challenged them, and empowered them to step up.

I saw a post recently on LinkedIn by a founder saying that they would never invest in junior people because they couldn’t afford to spend time training them up. I just think that is so short sighted. There are big risks in any hiring event – not in the least the cultural fit – and If you are always looking out just for experience and tenure, then you miss what is often right in front of you and risk devaluing your company’s most important asset – your team.

If you like this and you’d like to hear more, then check out my new book “The Startup Handbook – A Founder’s Guide to Building a Business”. Available in e-book (US$6.99), paperback (US$18.99) and hardback (US$25.99)

So, please go and buy a copy here and leave me a (good) review ??

#startup #empowerment #buildingforsuccess