Building a Successful Team

You may have heard that I recently launched my new book “The Startup Handbook – A Founder’s Guide to Building a Business”. If you haven’t rushed out and bought it (yet), then here is a snippet from the book that focuses on some of the lessons I learned about building a successful team… sort of like a try before you buy :)

Hiring the right people is make or break

One of the most important success factors for any founder is making sure that as you grow, you build a successful team around you and you hire the right people to that team. If you don't then your business is always going to be too reliant on you.

Over the course of my involvement in RFI we hired more than 400 people around the world and I would be lying if I said that every person we hired worked out perfectly. It’s just not possible to have a 100 percent successful hiring process, no matter how many frameworks and tests you implement.

In addition, and especially if you’re starting out, it’s not always possible to have an expensive psychometric testing process for every person you bring in – you need to be nimble.

However, being nimble doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to do everything you can to ensure that your hiring process works. After all, hiring the wrong person can be incredibly disruptive to the business. It costs money yes, but importantly, when you’re growing fast, there is a time cost to training someone who doesn’t work out.

Define and justify what you are looking for

When hiring you need to ensure that you are considering not just what someone has learned or contributed but how they’ve learned and contributed. Ultimately, the experience that people have around the things they've learned are critical in determining how they're going to interact.

Obviously, there are nonnegotiables for roles that require professional qualifications (if you need an accountant or a lawyer, then you need someone qualified); but in my view, the most important part of hiring the right people is ensuring that you have not only defined the things that you're looking for, but that you have justified why it is that you want those things.

• Define them so that you have a ready checklist of things that can be used as screeners or goal attributes.
• Justify them so that you don’t go looking for things that might not necessarily be accretive to a role.

The last thing you want is for your hiring process to be a box-ticking exercise. So, here are the most important things that I look for when hiring:

• Curiosity. For me, this is probably the most important trait that I want in anyone I work with. I want to work with people who look beyond what is in front of them and seek the additional insights that will ensure they are better informed.
• Bias to optimism. The way team members approach new challenges, client and colleague interactions, or day-to-day tasks is dictated by their attitude. I have learned over more than twenty years that it is far better to hire someone who doesn’t quite have the skills yet but has a can-do attitude than someone who has all the skills but is not enthused by the challenges. Hire for attitude; train for skill.
• Stakeholder management. Managing client and stakeholder expectations is such an important part of doing a good job, and I believe it’s worth digging into during the hiring process. I always like to—hypothetically—put people in a situation where they cannot possibly deliver what they have promised to a client by the deadline it is due and ask them how they would handle it. I’m not looking for the people who would work all night to try and get it done without raising the issue. I’m looking for the people who would contact the client, manage their expectations, ask for priorities within the delivery, and work to manage the situation as best they can.
• Problem-solving. It’s useful to see how people approach a problem and the processes they go through to find a solution. However, it’s not possible to see this in an interview unless you explicitly give them a problem to solve. My favorite when hiring analysts is to ask them to estimate the size of a particular market without any access to external information. The answer that they get to is not important; it’s the process that they go through that is key. You want people who can break it down into steps and lean on what they know.
• International outlook. Living and working or studying outside your country of birth is an incredibly valuable experience. In living overseas, you have shown yourself to be able to cope with different cultures and foreign bureaucracy. You’ve also lived outside your comfort zone, something that you want any team member to be able to do if a crisis occurs. However, not everyone has had the opportunity to work or study overseas, and so you want to look for those who have a wide-angled lens when it comes to approaching issues, and an international outlook goes a long way to contributing to this.
• The degree more than the subject. Maybe it’s because I am a product of the UK university system—where it doesn’t matter what you study, as long as you’re doing well—but I don’t pay a great deal of attention to the degree subject that someone has (see my point above for exceptions to this, such as for legal or accounting roles). If they’re curious and have the right attitude and they’ve applied for the job, then they’ve got a chance. The first analyst we ever hired was an English Literature graduate - she saw things in the data that others didn't.
• Diversity. The final thing that I am looking for when interviewing is whether a candidate will bring a special something to team diversity. Diversity of experience, education, background, outlook—you name it, all are accretive to the team dynamic and are to be desired if you want to avoid group-think.

Ultimately, by defining the things that you want to prioritize when looking for a candidate and then going through the process of articulating—even if only to yourself—why those things are a priority, then you are off to a great start.

Personally, if I found those things above or a majority of them, then I was pretty confident that I had found the right person for the team.