Behind Every Successful Business is a Strong Team

Building a business relies on you creating and leading a team of able and committed people, who grow with the business and power its success. If you have growth ambitions for your company, you can’t do it alone. You need to attract, develop and motivate the right people, who will build the business with you.

A good team should know your business inside out, and they’ll be able to manage its operations effectively as it exists in its current form. An even better team is also capable of acquiring the skills and experience it will need in the future as the business grows and evolves, and will care about the business achieving this growth. To power your business as it heads into the future, your team must consist of adaptable and resilient people, who can grow with it, shoulder to shoulder.

How do you decide whether your team can meet the challenge?

In the first instance, you’ll need to predict and define the challenges that your business will face as it develops, and as its organisational complexity increases. You’ll also have to invest time in evaluating your team’s strengths in order to assess if they can meet these challenges, as well as identify any gaps.

This will necessitate making a careful assessment of your individual team members. It may seem tough, but you need to determine who can deal with those challenges effectively and who can’t. Not everyone has the capability to keep taking on more, or to lead in an increasingly large company, and not everyone wants to. It’s important for their wellbeing, and the company’s success, that people are not pushed beyond their limit.

When evaluating your team, you need to consider the following important factors:

• Do the team members possess the necessary skills and experience to flourish in the company as it develops into a larger and more complex organisation?
• Have they got the right mindset – are they resilient, flexible and, above all, committed to the company?
• As the entire business expands, will your team’s structure enable individual members to further develop their own roles?
• Do the members of your team fit the particular roles that you’ve assigned to them?
• Is the team passionate about succeeding? Do they perceive and recognise the personal benefits they might enjoy through the company’s growth?

If you answer “no” to any of these questions, then you’ll need to think long and hard about those team members. It may be a hard task, but in the end, you’ll have to accept that there may be people who can’t adapt to your business expansion.

Some people will thrive taking on numerous new challenges and continuously developing their skills, others will not. But they may nonetheless be solid, valuable team members you don’t want to lose by pushing them too far. So it’s also useful to think laterally about alternative options to retain and use their skills and keep them feeling valued, without them becoming a blocker, or becoming stressed.

Ultimately however you need to do what’s right for the business. Experience has taught me difficult decisions don’t get easier the longer you leave them, nor do situations resolve themselves. And it’s not ‘kinder’ to leave someone struggling in a role that asks more and more from them that they aren’t able, or willing, to give.

Making sure you have the right people with the right skills, expertise and, crucially, mindset is key, as is plugging any gaps you’ve identified that would hold back your future growth.  At this point, you should also consider how the day to day running of your business will be affected by any alterations you make to the team;

• Is any further reconfiguration needed?
• How might individual team members need to evolve and grow in conjunction with the business?
• What will you do to support this?
• At what point is the next iteration of your structure and leadership team likely to be needed, and what can you do now to start to put the foundations for that in place?

Creating and maintaining a successful team is never easy – and the job is never finished, the more you grow, the more work is needed. This is a challenge that demands a diverse set of skills, so at BHP we’ve devised our very own Business Leadership Academy. This resource is developed and delivered by a group of successful business owners, who have hands-on experience of growing a business. We’re eager to help you with all your business needs, and to offer you our support along your road to expansion. To arrange a call or an exploratory face-to-face meeting, please click here.