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Is your business today where you want it to be tomorrow? Is your business...
- Growing rapidly
- At a plateau
- In crisis
- In need of an exit strategy?
The Vann Group Journal delivers insights and actionable advice specifically to businesses facing these challenges.
This month, we share insight on how to assemble a truly exceptional team – the next critical step in building your successful business after creating your blue ocean strategy and securing the necessary funding to execute your strategy.
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About the Vann Group
The Vann Group is a professional advisory firm that assists companies in transition to unlock their value. We provide practical business counsel to transitional companies through a customized approach that is founded upon our family’s passion for business and a 150+ year entrepreneurial track record.
About Client First Associates
Client First Associates is a Vann Group company that helps businesses run better through organizational effectiveness services including conflict resolution and team building, leadership development, hiring models, compensation systems and organizational design.
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Do You Have The Right People On The Bus?
This is one of the questions we asked you last month. This month, we’re going to take this question and concept a giant step further.
Making sure you have the right people “on the bus” is especially important during a down economy, because an incredible team will 1) do whatever it takes to succeed, 2) improve productivity, and 3) generate better ideas and make better decisions.
Let’s start with a few questions…
Do you have or have you had a star employee? Someone who consistently exceeds your expectations? Someone who you always look forward to meeting with? Someone who completely shares your vision for the business and complements your efforts in pursuing the vision? Someone who works as hard or harder than you do and still comes in every morning with a smile?
This is a truly exceptional employee.
Imagine if your entire team was like this employee. Not a clone -- because everyone has their own highly personalized strengths and weaknesses. But having an entire management team or better yet an entire organization of truly exceptional employees would be a tremendous asset, competitive advantage, and a clear path toward your vision.
This is not a dream. It can be reality.
It begins with two convictions:
- Do not hire anyone who is not exceptional -- because in the long run, the lost productivity of an empty position
will be insignificant compared to the potential of a truly exceptional team.
- Commit to the very difficult policy of mandating exit strategies for people who are not exceptional.
Before we go on, we need to say that exceptional does not mean perfect, because guess what… none of us are. An exceptional employee is perfect for their position, because his or her objective, energy level, attitude, skills, experience and values are completely aligned with what the organization needs (and is prepared to offer).
The next step is to craft a recruitment process that is right for your organization. To help you do so, a detailed prototype is now available in our newly released white paper, entitled “Hiring for Your Dream Team” at www.vann-group.com. This white paper is written by Tom Lippie, President of Client First Associates, a leading organizational development firm and a Vann Group Company. Tom’s recruitment process is straight forward and may need little customizing for your business.
As you prepare to implement the Client First Associates’ recruitment process, we encourage you to think about two concepts that will prove to be critical success factors – patience and culture.
Patience
In order to make your dream team of exceptional employees a reality, you must have patience to:
- Follow the recruitment process that is right for your organization (start with the prototype newly added to www.vann-group.com).
- Wait until you find the right person for the position and someone who you really want on your team. Remember, the lost productivity of an empty position is insignificant compared to having the right person in the right place.
- Devote the time to orient and train your new hires to facilitate their contribution to the whole organization and ignite their energy, attitude and excitement about becoming an exceptional team member and working with other exceptional team members.
Culture
Finding the right people depends on understanding your own organization’s culture. For example:
- If your success depends on fast action then you should have a culture that fosters empowerment through training and a management philosophy that is educative v. punitive when someone makes the wrong decision.
- Or, if your business depends on a large volume of simple transactions, then your culture might be more about speed and customer service than about depth of product knowledge.
The components of culture include values and beliefs about what’s most important for your company, customers and employees; underlying assumptions about how you want people to do their jobs; the prevailing attitude throughout the organization; how people behave; what type of language people use; and how the organization makes decisions.
Is your work environment highly professional and serious, casual looking but hard core competitive, fun loving? Taking some time to articulate your company culture is an important foundation in assembling an exceptional team.
If you have any questions about anything you’ve read in this edition of the Vann Group Journal, please call:
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