Finding and Building Your Team
When to build a team
Hiring or contracting for other people to help you is expensive and risky, but it is essential for all but the simplest or smallest of enterprises. Many tedious tasks that would have kept you from more valuable tasks can now be delegated to an AI service. If you are not using AI at least as an assistant, then you ultimately will not be competitive. This blog is not about how to use AI as there is no shortcut to the need to experiment.
Who and what are you looking for?
The “what” you are looking for is a set of skills that complement your skills and/or provide critical new skills. The “who” you are looking to hire, is a person that will help you build the culture you want. Some people recommend you look for someone with a personality or has traits that complements yours. If you feel comfortable as a leader and feel comfortable dealing with all types of personalities, then you do not need to over-constrain your selection process beyond looking for someone with the right skills and culture fit.
It is therefore important that you think through and write down a description of:
The skill sets you need from each individual you need to hire or contract for essential support,
How you plan to test individuals you are considering hiring for their skill set,
How you will describe your culture to prospective employees and contractors,
How you plan to test individuals you are considering hiring for their cultural fit.
The script you plan to use to describe the job, the culture, and the hiring process to prospective hires.
Recall that “testing” should include a competitive component, so people you are considering hiring must feel challenged to justify their skills and cultural fit. Even businesses with sophisticated hiring process hire people who do not work out. No hiring tests are perfect, but they do significantly improve the odds of the person you have hired of being productive and motivated to support the mission and culture of the organization.
How and where to look
You should structure the search for your initial hires as individual projects with each step thought through and adjusted according to what you know, see and are experiencing. You do not want to waste the money or time required to create a hiring process until you are established enough that you need to hire multiple people with the same skill sets to justify the cost and time. If you are flush with cash you may choose to hire a search firm to construct and supervise their hiring process to find the employee you need. Any given search firm may or may not be in position to deliver more qualified and motivated candidates than you can by constructing and leading a thoughtful project. Also note however that a search firm’s objectives do not align exactly with yours, which makes it tricky to manage, so if you are thinking about this please mention it when you answer the questions for this session.
LinkedIn is a social media site for professionals with tens of million active users that you can search for resumes that indicate experiences that may align with the skill sets you need. They offer services that can put you in direct contact with users you may be interested in meeting and potentially interviewing.
Risks of hiring someone that does not fit decline if you have seen or reliably heard of individuals that have demonstrated mastery of similar tasks. Individuals who are proud of their skill set may be motivated by a position that enables them to further develop their exemplary skill set provided there is a mutually good cultural fit.
When and how to fire someone that is not a good fit
If someone is not productive or works in a way that is detrimental to the culture you aspire to create, you must fire them, otherwise they sap the ability of team to create and deliver as much happiness to others as possible. With a productive hire 1+1= 3; with an unproductive one 1+1= ½, that is a huge difference!
As soon as you recognize a person’s productivity or cultural fit does not meet your expectations, you want to make sure the lack their lack of productivity or cultural fit is not a manifestation of poor communications. To do so, you need to have a direct conversation about how you can help the person meet your expectations. You are offering to cooperate on a shared objective of creating a project where the payoff is that you get a much more productive and aligned teammate and he or she can to remain on your exciting team. If there are significant constraints in time, money or resources available to support this desired transformation, you want to state them up front.
Even after stating your constraints, he or she may ask you to do things you are not able to do or cannot afford to do. They may ask you to shift your vision. The investment and payoff on your end of achieving the shared objective must work for both of you. If a mutually satisfying payoff is not possible, then state that and shift the conversation about a shared objective of enabling the person to find a job that is a better fit for them and therefor will have a better long term career potential. Be sincere; the key is to fire non-performers and cultural misfits cooperatively, after all you hired them.