Deciding to launch a startup company is an exciting but often challenging process. It requires patience and dedication to see a young business through its development years, especially considering market volatility and the constant operational changes needed as an organization scales.
However, while these challenges are often par for the course for entrepreneurs, one area that isn’t easy to coordinate is establishing a great team to help support the business. Having a collective of individuals all backing the same shared vision with a wide range of skills is an invaluable asset for startup businesses to gain, especially in the early stages.
While putting together an excellent team for your startup business isn’t impossible, it does take a certain amount of consideration to make sure you’re making the right hiring choices and setting employees up for success. Thankfully, there are some helpful strategies you can apply in this area.
What Makes a “Good Team?”
If you were to ask someone what makes a “good team,” the answers you receive will be widely different from one company to the next. This is because the importance of certain team dynamics is different for every business. However, when it comes to startup businesses, there are specific essential characteristics.
Some of these include:
- Unique Strengths – Recognizing how each team member is unique in their ability to help move the business forward. By leveraging an employee’s specific areas of strength, you’re able to provide active support to help them develop these abilities further, helping themselves and the organization.
- Complementary Skills – Trying to achieve diversity in background and associated experience levels helps to make sure all areas of a business’s operations are able to run smoothly. Startups benefit greatly from having a well-rounded team that’s made up of individuals with a wide range of skill sets, specifically those that complement those of others.
- Mutual Respect and Trust – Working to develop trust between employees and company leadership is critical to help create a high-performing team. If trust is in place, all employees are more likely to feel comfortable contributing more of their ideas and efforts toward common objectives while also providing additional support to the organization during challenging times.
- Open Communication – Creating a business environment that prioritizes open and honest communication is critical. This helps to support a positive company culture, with regular positive and constructive feedback being used to help all individuals improve while respecting the capabilities and limitations of others.
The Power of Creating a Shared Vision
Having a shared vision is an important part of running a startup business. It’s the glue that holds everything together and should be something that resonates with all members of the organization. When there is this type of alignment in the business, it helps to fuel motivation and build a deeper sense of commitment in everyone.
A shared vision also helps each employee feel a sense of ownership in the business they’re working for. This helps them go above and beyond what’s necessarily required of them while making it easier to make tougher decisions and work autonomously toward business objectives.
In order to establish and maintain this type of vision, it requires some important actions:
Define a Compelling Vision
The company vision you create should be easy to understand and inspiring. It should help to provide a believable picture of the future of the business that employees can get behind while motivating them over the years.
It’s important to state the business’s mission and positive impact on the industry and on those who work for it to strengthen the vision’s appeal.
Communicate the Vision Consistently
The vision you create should be easy to understand and well-distributed across all applicable channels. Leadership teams should work to weave the vision into team communications during meetings or company events while also making sure the vision is clearly displayed in offices or on the company website.
Another great idea for growing businesses is to invest resources into creating a short but impactful video that captures the reasoning behind the vision and makes it more tangible for both employees and potential customers.
Involve Your Team in Vision Development
The important thing to remember about creating a shared vision for the business is that it truly should be “shared” from the start. New businesses should try to avoid simply dictating a company vision from the top down and instead look for opportunities to co-create a vision with input from internal teams.
This can be accomplished by hosting brainstorming sessions or workshops with the team so that everyone can communicate their different ideas and perspectives. This allows you to get valuable insights from others as well as create a shared sense of ownership.
Celebrate Milestones Along the Way
Another priority when building a team is to recognize and celebrate each individual’s progress toward a shared company vision. This helps create a strong sense of momentum and achievement for everyone.
Celebrating milestones with the entire team helps reinforce the importance of everyone supporting a shared vision and helping to move the organization closer to its goals.
Building The Trust Factor
The trust you establish in your business plays a major factor in how well you build relationships with employees. When employees feel like they can really trust their leadership, they are more likely to take more risks that can pay off for the business while unlocking more creativity when handling their day-to-day tasks.
However, building a strong foundation of trust can take time and effort on behalf of the business. This all begins by setting the right tone while establishing a culture known for transparency and shared responsibility.
Below are some helpful ways businesses can start to build healthy levels of trust within a team:
- Lead By Example – Startup businesses get what they put in when it comes to developing a high-performing team. It’s important for leaders to model their own behavior on the attitudes and work ethic they hope to get from their teams. This also includes being open and honest about mistakes and working collectively to improve on them.
- Be Transparent – Don’t be afraid to create a format supporting open and honest business dialogues. Siloing information or only allowing select groups to have a voice in active discussions can create misunderstandings and leave some employees feeling inadequate. By showing that all of your employee’s opinions matter in whatever capacity makes sense for your business, you’ll create many more opportunities to make the business better.
- Keep Your Promises – It’s important to stick to your business commitments and always keep your promises to employees. This helps to strengthen trust and demonstrates that leadership teams can be depended on moving forward.
- Give Credit When It’s Due – It can be easy for busy organizations to forget the importance of giving credit when credit is due. Recognizing employees’ accomplishments is a critical element of improving team morale and ensuring everyone feels like a valuable part of the business.
Embracing Open Communication
Embracing open communication in your business doesn’t just mean looking for opportunities to fill employees in on new initiatives. It’s also about creating a safe space for all employees to feel confident and comfortable becoming an active voice in the business regardless of their role or position.
Below are some helpful techniques for improving open communication levels within the team:
Schedule Regular Team Meetings
You should prioritize creating regularly scheduled team meetings for an opportunity to discuss how well the company is progressing as well as address any operational challenges that are emerging. Having a structured format for these meetings ensures you’re getting the most value out of the time set aside while ensuring all essential topics are covered.
The great thing about these meetings is that you can choose a variety of different formats. Roundtable discussions, casual chats in the kitchen or other open office spaces, or brainstorming sessions are all great ideas when creating an engaging environment for employees.
Value One-on-One Conversations
It’s important to look for time to have direct one-on-one conversations with employees in addition to larger team meetings. The value of these types of discussions is to create a more personalized discussion with various employees to privately discuss important feedback and to provide any additional support an employee may need. Business leaders should be open to reciprocal feedback in these settings, as this will add to the productive and respectful nature of discussions.
Start Building a More Effective Team
Growing a young startup can be an exciting time for entrepreneurs. However, it’s essential to ensure you have the right team working with you to help grow the business and that all employees have the tools they need to succeed. By working to establish a shared vision and playing to their strengths, startup owners can use the strategies discussed to build their teams successfully and achieve better success for their businesses.
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