Seven Tips for Building an Amazing Team

This is a guest blog written by Helen Pethybridge from ActionCOACH.

As a business owner, you understand how important it is to have the best people around you. And when they’re in, then making sure they are all pulling in the same direction in your growing business. Once you have the right people in the right places, that have the trust and support they need, you will see massive increases in morale, productivity and therefore results: increased profits. Here are my 7 tips for building an amazing team:

  1. Clear responsibilities

Firstly, get off to a flying start by being clear – and I mean really clear – on what is the work to be done, how will the work be measured, and how are these activities best grouped together into role or jobs. Make sure there is ‘clear space’ between the accountabilities of each different role in the team – so the job holders don’t ‘trip over’ one another.

  1. Hire on attitude

Next define the skills and experiences that are absolutely necessary to do the job and keep them to the minimum you can get away with. Be as broad as you can in terms of the type of product experience, the years’ experiences already gained, the qualifications needed, the broader the range of transferable skills the better for attracting more applicants. This allows you to attract as many diverse people as possible, from a broad range of backgrounds and industries. THEN you get the opportunity to narrow down your applicant pool based on attitude. Remember, it’s much easier to train skills, than change attitudes… So, hire on attitude. This gives you a real head start on creating an amazing team.

  1. Nurture

My third tip is to nurture your team members especially your new hires through their onboarding time. You’ve spent all this time and effort on hiring them, so why wouldn’t you invest a little more time to make sure they land smoothly in your team? It beggars belief that when a manager hires their dream candidate they can’t manage to be in the office with them on their first day.

  1. Give them space

So now you’ve a got great people in place in well-designed roles, next you need to keep them and build them into a team. Your role is to give them overall direction and structure and then let them get on with it.  You’ve hired the best, so show your trust in them. Provide ‘leadership cover’ if things go a little awry that supports them and take the flack yourself.

  1. Be accessible

Give your team first priority on your time. They’ll deal with everything for you as long as they know that when they do actually need you, you are accessible and responsive. Look after the team, and the team will look after the work, and the clients.

  1. Reward your team’s success

Give credit where credit is due, publicly recognise and celebrate the team’s achievements and success encompassing the whole team effort not just the visible team members ‘fronting’ the work they’re always supported by their colleagues in the background probably doing most of the work.

  1. Be a risk taker

My final top tip is to take risks on talented people. Keep everyone stretched and challenged. Support them to grow into their role, rather than hiring ‘ready-made’ who’ll be bored before you’ve finished their induction…

When teams have ‘space’ to operate and have the trust and support from their leader, they have a happy habit of getting on with working together, delivering amazing results and supporting each other and you just got yourself a dream team.

Find out more about what Helen does at actioncoach.co.uk/helen-pethybridge.

Learning to Manage Your Team

Recently one of my clients asked me to help one of the managers in her business, who wasn’t that confident in his role. Rather than sending the manager on an off the shelf ‘learn to manage’ course, my client asked what I thought would work best. After a brief conversation with my client, to find out about her concerns, I then spoke to the manager. As a result, we decided that some 1-2-1 management coaching sessions with the manager would be ideal.

One of the manager’s main issues was that he needed to learn how to deal with long serving members of staff. There had been a number of incidences when he might ask them to do something, for them to tell him that it wasn’t part of their job. Both the members of staff have been with the company for some time and like the way things always used to be. They weren’t keen on change – something many of us struggle with.

Rather than come down heavy handed on his staff, the manager and I agreed, during one of our sessions, that he needed to learn how to push back and challenge his team members. To help him do this more effectively we used the Quest personality profiling system, to show up in which areas he is stronger and weaker. This showed us the skills that we needed to work on. It’s not possible to turn all your weaknesses into strengths; you need to understand which are the most important ones that you can develop.

We also looked at the manager’s best communication style and how that relates to the communication styles of his team members. We discussed the importance of not treating everyone the same. Instead, look at how they like to be managed and find a middle ground.

I will carry on working with my client’s manager, over the coming months, to coach him in his job and help him to overcome other obstacles that will come his way, as his confidence builds.

If you would like to arrange 1-2-1 Coaching for your members of staff, do get in touch. We can discuss the issues and work out the best way forward, for you and for them. Call us on 0118 940 3032 or click here to email me.