Pull these 7 levers to build strong teams

A friend of mine recently asked for my advice in relation to building teams. It was good timing, as in 2018 I invested about 50% of my time on hiring and implementing development pathways for our teams in Sg and KL. It takes an awful lot of time.

In spending that time last year, I learned an awful lot.

I have an obligation to our team to grow our business in Asia. What that also means is that I have an obligation to our people to ensure that we achieve high retention & happiness amongst the high-performers that we hire, and in whom we put our trust and belief. If we don't achieve that and our people churn, we jeopardise our ability to grow.

I'm still figuring this out, but what I've learned so far is that doing the following things well will have a huge positive impact on the strength of the team that you build:

1. Values-based hiring. Our company values are Kindness, Entrepreneurialism and Impact. Our interview questions are predominantly targeted at elucidating if prospective new joiners demonstrate these values. We interview far more people than we hire - in 2018 about 1 in 8 at final round - and in many cases what makes the difference is a lack of values-fit.
2. Involve as many of your current team as possible in the hiring process. Make sure that interviewees meet the people that they will be spending a huge amount of their time with. They should be interested to spend time together; they should be curious about each others' lives. If your existing team don't collectively sign off on the hire, don't make it. Be as certain as you can that when someone new joins the team, they will integrate into the group socially. I don't believe a company can create (or even engender) a great social culture, it must come naturally - and the way it comes naturally is having kind, interesting, sociable people with some level of shared interests.
3. Invest time, effort and energy in understanding goals & aspirations of employees, and creating a development pathway for them based on that. Give them way more responsibility than they think they can handle. 
4. Be there to be pulled on, but give your teams autonomy. Hire someone that you believe can do the job. Trust them to do the job. Get out of their way.
5. High performers and sustainable superstars respond to growth opportunity, responsibility and trust, rather than pay and perks.
6. Don't attempt to coach employees in an area where you are not genuinely an expert/specialist. In an area where you are not, don't give instructions. By all means give your opinion, but remember that their opinion is likely more valuable if it's their workstream.
7. Rather than imposing policies on remote working and holidays etc. try to achieve something closer to an overarching policy of 'Do Impactful Work'. If people do that from their home, the office, the gym, or wherever, it doesn't matter. If they choose to take holiday at a time when they know they will be hugely in demand, and so pass the buck to someone else, they obviously don't care so much about impact. If they care about impact, they will produce great work without adhering to hours on when they should come and go etc. As much as possible, they should also be trusted to do it on their timeline. 

We're still growing and we're still hiring. Check out our open roles here.

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We're hiring in Singapore at Rainmaking.io. Check out our open roles here.

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Photo by Laurent Perren on Unsplash