Tips for Building Your Team

You’ve got your business plan in place, and you have the money to get started. Now you need to build an organization of employees that know their jobs, understand the business goals, believe in what your doing, and can work together as a team to have your business running smoothly. The following are tips for building your team:

• Team strategy – Each member of the team needs to understand the business goals, the time line expected of them, and that they are expected to work together toward a common goal. They need to support each other as well as performing to your level of expectation.
• Team commitment – Every member of the team must be committed to working together to complete the team missions. They need to feel that even when working together, each member is important to the team. By recognizing their personal contributions, and their individual achievements, as well as the team efforts, you will have a team in which jealousies will not grow.
• Team competence – The team is only as good as the sum of its parts. Stay in touch with your employees, and personally observe their competence. If one member of the team is not doing his part, it drags down the whole team and causes bad feelings. Support will disappear, and so will the efficiency and quality of your business.
• Control – Certain rules and boundaries were set in place when you set up your systems and procedures. Does your team understand these limits and follow them? When solutions are needed, do they have the leeway to work it out themselves? You cannot be so controlling that your team cannot function effectively and efficiently.
• Authority – This goes hand in hand with control. The team leader must have authority regarding money and time (but within limits set forth from the beginning).
• Collaboration and communication – The lines must be kept open between the business owners and the team. Both should always know what is happening, what solutions are being considered, and any changes in cost or time. If team cooperation has become a problem, it should be addressed at once and rectified quickly, so that the team can again function with total loyalty and a single mind for reaching set goals.