Team Building and Hiring A-Players

08 Sep Team Building and Hiring A-Players

When forming an employment team you have a lot of decisions to make. For the big picture view of where those future team members can come from I look to The Founder’s Dilemma. The author states that “Core founders have many options for where to look for co-founders, who can be envisioned as a series of three concentric circles. The inner circle includes people whom the core founder is in direct contact because they already have a relationship that ranges from old neighborhood friends to husbands and wives. The middle circle includes people met through indirect contact or indirect networking; that is, through a mutual acquaintance. The outer circle includes people met through an impersonal search process; that is, strangers who are identified for having particular traits or abilities-or sometimes just because the founder takes a liking to a new acquaintance”

The next step in this process is to determine whether the team should be homogenous or focus on team diversity. “Birds of a feather flock together” or as sociologists like to call it the “natural tendency homophily”. In small businesses people who are more alike are disproportionately more likely to found companies together. According to Noam Wasserman, author of The Founder’s Dilemma, “those homogeneous teams are 46 times more likely to form a company together.”

 Benefits and risks of homogenous teams

Benefits:

• It is easy and it is comfortable to work with people who are just like you.
• It takes less time to find people who are like you.
• You develop an efficient working relationship with similar people faster than dissimilar people.
• It is easier to create a company identity with clear delineations between member responsibilities

Risks:

• Overlapping partner skill sets make it more likely that the team will have redundant strengths and can by default be missing a few critical skills
• Familiarity may breed laziness in terms of setting a well-structured foundation for the organization
• Homogenous relationships, in particularly friends and family, can created so much stability that the company will struggle to grow. It is too easy to keep the status quo.

Role of the founders in building teams

According to How to hire A-Players – “Nothing has a bigger impact on the results of your business and the quality of your life than hiring – and keeping- A-players”. Since the founders are ultimately responsible for the direction that the company goes in, it is up to those individuals to hire the right people.

Key points for hiring A-Players

• To build a substantial business you need to hire A-players and let them build your business for you. B or C level talent will wait on you to do the building.
• Hiring A-Players will allow you to have a work-personal life balance
• Recognize that you cannot make a C-player into an A-player. You need to hire A- players from the start.
• Look at your current staff. Use your best coaches as your recruiters. They will attract your next round of A-level talent
• Recruiting A-players is everyone’s job not just the Human Resources Manager’s job
• It is likely that the team you have now is not the team you need to get to the next level. Look at where you can upgrade you talent
• Take your time when you are in the hiring process. Make sure everyone you hire is a key piece of the puzzle not just someone to keep a seat warm