How to build the right team

If you’ve been leading people for a while, you’ve undoubtedly heard that one of your main responsibilities is to build the right team. It’s such common wisdom that you’re probably nodding your head. How much time did you spend last week on building your team? It’s a tricky question, right??

At first, you will probably struggle to identify a particular chunk of time you did this because it’s not immediately clear what goes into building the right team. By now, however, you’ve probably figured out that the time you spent coaching, gave feedback to a teammate, hired a new team member or tried to figure out who to give this new important project to is actually part of building the right team.

What follows is my attempt to put a clearer framework around what it actually means to build the right team and how to do it.

For the purpose of flow and the general way writing works, the following will seem linear. But it isn’t. It’s a complex system of integrated parts that are interconnected and play into each other.

Before we continue, a couple of caveats.

• Building the team is not a one-time task but rather a continuous process through the life-cycle of your business
• Building the team is not a short-term, one-quarter type of task. It’s not a 10-year vision type of task either. I’ve found that working with a 12-24 months horizon works best.

One final point, I’ll mostly look at this from the perspective of building a leadership team (so from the point of a Founder/CEO). The framework is more or less the same for managers of team(s) as well but the examples are slightly different.

Let’s dive in.

Big-picture first.

As usual, your vision and strategy should be a good place to start. If your team happens to be the leadership team, start with your company strategy. If your team is one of the other teams at the company, hopefully, you have a pretty good idea of how your team fits into the company strategy and you have a specific team strategy (If you happen not to, speak to your CEO. Now.)

Reminding yourself where you are going and how you are getting there should put you in the right state of mind. Hopefully, questions like these start coming up:

• What are the critical success factors of this strategy?
• If 2 years from now we had failed, why was it?
• Is this strategy a pivot and hence involves significant shifts?

By now, you probably have some functions, teams or even particular people that have come to mind in terms of how they need to evolve to execute on the strategy. Write these down.

The underestimated org structure

How functions, teams and processes are interlinked is crucial. However, in my experience, this is more often than not managed by ‘going with the flow', rather than doing hard thinking on it.

A number of things to bear in mind here:

• Product vs. Functional - I don’t think this a super straightforward choice, e.g., you can read about Apple’s org structure
• Who reports to whom - lines of reporting are sometimes tricky and what I’ve found is that they are often left to whatever the status quo is although this might not make sense
• Passing the baton - in processes where multiple teams are involved, places where things tend to break are where one team’s contribution stops and another one starts. For example, a new client is passed from Sales to AM or when new products go into a marketing phase. RACI matrices, albeit seemingly bureaucratic, are a great start.

Who needs to do what?

A quick reminder - there is nothing linear in these steps; it is a deeply interconnected system where steps inform on and affect each other.

We are now more at the tactical level. What does each of your teams (or people) need to deliver in order for your company to be successful? Don’t think about your quarterly OKRs here. Think more long-term. Maybe some need to build new processes; maybe for some it’s more about execution and a structured way of delivering; maybe others need to be innovative in their approaches, etc.

Figuring this out (and writing it down) should be shaping quite an interesting high-level picture already about the different parts of the machine you are building and how they should look in the 12-24 month horizon.

Where are we now?

What is the state at t0 of all the things you identified above?

Maybe the processes are half-built; maybe the execution machine lacks scalability; maybe the last time you innovated was never.

The most important part here is to be honest and I don’t only mean about the state at t0. Maybe you don’t know the state at t0. If that’s the case, be sure to figure it out before you jump to conclusions.

I’ve also found that this part of the exercise can be sometimes discouraging. You have this marvellous long-term strategy but as of today, you might be very far from having the right capabilities to execute. That’s okay. Acknowledging the truth and working with the right information can only be helpful.

Bridging the gap; Part I

So, how do we get from A to B?

What I’ve found is that I more often than not understand what needs to change in practical business terms but sometimes underestimate the process and/or cultural changes (second- and third-order consequences) that need to happen along with it.

For example, you might need to increase your marketing team from 2 to 6 people in order to accommodate a more aggressive advertising strategy. But does your marketing team have an effective onboarding plan? Or maybe your engineering team needs to be more involved in product development. But does your product team understand how to facilitate this?

Having the right people without the right processes and culture will get you nowhere.

Bridging the gap, Part II

So far you might have noticed we haven’t even begun speaking about people. Now that we understand what is our current state, where we want to get to and how, it begs the question ‘Who will execute?'

Choosing the right person for a role is a huge responsibility and it starts with figuring out what skills, abilities, experience and personality should this person have. For example, if you are building out a new function, you probably need a builder personality and not one who is more about execution. If you need to build scalability in a process, you probably want someone who’s very structured and methodical. If you want for something to move more quickly, you probably need someone who’s not afraid to break things.

Skills and abilities are more easily figured out than experience and personality. If you are doing a direct-to-consumer marketing strategy, you probably need someone who understands SEO and PPC campaigns (particular skills).

Experience and personalities are much harder. I’ll look at these separately

Experience - as a general rule of thumb I like to lean more towards potential / growth mindset and not experience. However, there are specific situations and roles, where the right experience is quite important. For example, if you are looking for someone to build out a function, or you’re changing your programming language, you probably should be leaning heavily into experience. These are generally situations, where you don’t know how exactly something needs to be done and you are looking for someone who has done it / been heavily involved in doing it. Bear in mind that this does not apply to hiring only.

Personalities - to start with something that applies more towards hiring, we should never compromise with culture. People may have various quirks which is more than acceptable but the value systems of the company and its people should be aligned. Examples of quirks might be if someone is a bit shy, too direct or maybe talks too much. Examples of values on the other hand might be things like honesty, integrity, growth mindset, etc. All of these are not good or bad, it’s a question of alignment.

Let’s get back to our high-level understanding of moving from A to B, what type of personality is best suited to execute? Are you looking for someone more aggressive, or someone more diplomatic, maybe it’s someone with incredible attention to detail and perfection vs someone who moves quickly but compromises some quality. What is it? These are examples of rather different personality traits and in very few people can easily change their style between polar approaches (and even if they can, they have a preference).

At this point, I write all of this down and have a profile of the ideal person to get the job done. Then comes the question…

Hire or grow?

While some cases are obvious, the difficult decisions are where the answer is ‘it depends'.?

Statistically, you’ll probably find that growing people internally is the more common theme and it makes sense. You as a leader and your organization have already invested heavily in your people. This means they understand your industry, understand your market and competition, understand your internal organization, and have already built valuable relationships and built ways of work. In addition, you’ve spent way more time with them and can assess their potential for a future role much better than in a hiring process.

Having said that, I would argue that one should always go through the ‘hire or grow’ decision-making process.

What does the decision depend on?

• How quickly you need to move between states A and B - how critical is state B to your business? Is it peace time or war time?
• Your confidence in the learning curve potential of the person you want to grow - how quickly do you expect the person to grow?
• Your organisation's ability to absorb new talent effectively - how strong is your culture and can you onboard well enough?
• Access to talent - how good is your employer brand? Is there enough supply for the talent you are looking for??

Second-order consequences of (not) growing people

• When you choose ‘grow’, this affects the particular person's motivation positively and also has knock-on effects on the broader team as it sends a strong signal that you are committed to their personal growth (this goes for the opposite direction as well, albeit I think the effect is smaller)
• New people bring new perspectives and outside knowledge that might be missing in the organization

Just be crystal clear, there is no single right answer in every situation but the above should be a good starting point to think about how to make the decision.

How to hire/grow?

There are tons of great learning materials on growing and hiring people so I won’t spend too much time on this. I love the Mochary method on hiring. However, this part of the process of building the right team should not be underestimated.

The only thing I’d add is that in my experience, the ‘how’ part should not be left to chance and should be well-structured. This means having a clear plan on what you will do, how you will assess progress/candidates, when you would do checkpoints, etc.

Making the machine work

What we shouldn’t forget for a moment is that each of the ‘gaps’ we have identified in our teams are not independent challenges. These, as the steps above, are all parts of a system and appropriate time should be devoted to building an actual team.

There are three areas where I’d like to focus on:

• Building and sustaining a common understanding
• Focusing around the same goals
• Building teamwork

Building and sustaining a common understanding

This one is pretty obvious - your team should have the same understanding of your business, industry, market, customers, competitors, and the role of your team in the organization. However, this is often not the case. People are generally left to their own devices to build a coherent picture of the above.

Yes, there are the regular knowledge-sharing sessions, the all-hands meetings, the company portals, etc; which, don’t get me wrong, are super useful. These are very one-directional though - people are being talked at, not with. These are rarely places for deep discussions and the devil is in the details on this one.

I don’t have a magic bullet. Just bear in mind that what you are doing to get your team on the same page might not be enough. We should be placing more focus on discussions and questions, rather than information sharing alone.

Gaps in common understanding often shine through when you are solving difficult challenges or trying to innovate more rapidly.

Focusing on the same goals?

The ‘why’ of this is obvious.

Most companies are utilising some sort of management by objectives framework, probably OKRs. If you are not, I’d strongly encourage you to explore it. Start here. Also, check out Quantive for managing OKRs.

A number of pitfalls I’d like to point out:

• Using a goal-setting framework, e.g., OKRs, does not magically solve your alignment challenges
• There are plenty of ways to use a goal-setting framework in the wrong way
• Frameworks are tools, not solutions - groundwork is still required, i.e., ensuring your team is aligned, playing your part in aligning between teams, keeping your eyes on the ball (goals) at all times, etc.

Building teamwork

This is a difficult one.

I subscribe to the ‘Five Dysfunctions of a Team’ philosophy which, as you might have guessed, looks at 5 distinct components to ensure brilliant teamwork:

• Building Trust
• Mastering Conflict
• Achieving Commitment
• Embracing Accountability
• Focusing on Results

The book is short and extremely practical. I highly recommend it.

Bonus: implementing this framework in your daily management

Going back to the beginning, I do believe building the right team is one of the most important jobs of a leader.

So, here are my 5 cents to ensure we as leaders take care of this crucial task.

Set time

As everything that is important, we can’t be doing this randomly as part of the flow. The first step is to ensure we pay active attention to it and set aside time to ensure we are on the right track to build the right team.

The roles/skills matrix

Based on the ‘Bridging the Gap’ parts of this article, it should be relatively straightforward to build a matrix of how your core roles on the team will evolve and therefore what types of skills/experience/personality you need for the future.?

Keeping this roles/skills matrix as a live document will help you keep track of where you are and where you need to be.

The Growth Map

Be sure to utilize a structured process when it comes to growing the individuals on your team. If you want to learn more about the process in detail, we wrote an article, explaining the whole process.

Here are some of the main elements that should be part of that process:

• Clear expectations and timeframe for achieving them
• Clear direction on how to hit these expectations
• Ensuring enough resources are available for growth
• Regular check-ins to ensure progress is on track
• Continuous feedback throughout

Always be hiring

The way to find talent is often not on job boards. Talent also doesn’t just show up whenever you’re in need.

To ensure you build a potential talent pool, you could:

• Continuously work on nurturing your network (expansion but also building deeper relationships)
• Ensure you recognize the talent that is right for your organization when you see it
• Be less risk-averse with hiring good talent even if you are not extremely clear on how you can utilize them

Final thoughts

Building teams is difficult, exhausting, continuous and represents a wiggly path. However, it is also one of the most satisfying leadership experiences. It is also a must-have for a successful business and if done right, building an amazing team is a competitive advantage.

Written by: Yavor Popov, CEO

Any questions, please feel free to reach out