Your Leadership Brand: Building Effective Teams

But how do you build one when you have no experience recruiting and managing people?

Your Team Decides What Your Business becomes

Is the Perfect Team Member a Myth?

Coming to have a very defined profile of who you want on your team is a simple exercise that can have a monumental impact on your business.

It takes close examination of who you are as a leader. What are your personal strengths and weaknesses? What is you management style? What about your personality?

These are not only difficult questions to nail down, they take a keen sense of self-awareness and probably the opinion from people who know you.

What's Your Management Style?

Self-disciplined people will resent your attempts to micromanage them, and your aggressive style will be taken as a personal slight against them.

If your a business owner who expects natural self-motivation and discipline as a pre-requisite for employment, you must find, recruit, develop, and retain people who can learn and grow.

The right people are naturally self-starters and have an intrinsic need to improve themselves. By harnessing peoples' natural tendencies your company will improve, or it will get worse.

It depends on how rigorous you are about building effective teams.

In a culture full of independent people. . . position and title mean little. Barriers break down. . . the ability to thrive rests in the hands of the employees.

You, as the manager, have the enviable task of retaining the good ones and letting go of the people who don't fit.

Imagine the Day You Were Hired For Your Job. . .

What did you want to know the first day of work?

I'm sure you've experienced the strange feeling of meeting your new team members. Trying to remember everyone's name, your responsibilities, and your duties.

It can be overwhelming. But there's more. Building effective teams starts the minute your employee ever made contact with your business.

You must understand and address their concerns first before you can ever get them to "buy into" what you're doing.

Here are the questions running through your employees head from the first day:

• Is this the right place for ME?
• Are people going to like ME?
• Do I fit in here?
• Am I going to screw up?

And lots of other questions. . . but what strikes you about the previous questions. If you said all the questions are concerning "me" you'd be right.

Building effective team starts the second your employee sees your ad in the want ads.

The secret of bringing in quality team members is to continually improve the communication between your business and your prospective employee. Answer their questions along the way in the hiring process.

Streamline this process and you'll find more quality people, people just like you, coming to work for you or with you. This is the key to building effective teams from square one.