Creating the Best Team

Create the best team from the beginning. It makes it easier to blend business with their performance. A great team starts with a clear job scorecard. The job scorecard has to be understood by candidates. Mis-hire is avoided when converting confused job description into a very clear job scorecard. Job description has to be comprehensive and cover every aspect of the job.

It needs to contain responsibilities, budget and competencies required for the job. The accountabilities have to be related to job vacancy. The job scorecard spells out everything related to the job. It is better to recruit from network than hiring recruiters or running ads. Recruiting from network is a lovely method for creating the perfect team.

Recruiting high performers from internet will bring connections to other high performers. It is faster and cheaper. It will also bring better pre-screened candidate. Social media and email lists are methods of recruit, because they works. Companies have hired people through Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks. It might be good to keep contact when hiring through internet.

Keeping in touch with a lot of high performers is time consuming and social media save time. Recruiting from network includes writing articles to high performers. The next step is scanning all the candidates. Every book on how to get a job teaches low performers how to write high performers’ resumes. This is why HR professionals spend hours in interviews before realizing the candidate’s resume was hype and omitted many negative facts.

The best thing to do is to get best candidate through the door for interview. One effective method is the truth serum, introduced by Topgrading Inc. The truth serum is informing the candidates that they must arrange personal reference calls with former bosses, peers and subordinates. Requesting information about all jobs tells you who the person you are letting into your team is. It requests information about all jobs: full job dates (so short jobs can’t be hidden), full compensation history, estimated boss ratings or overall performance.

It also requests for estimated boss ratings of key competencies, true reasons for leaving employers, likes and dislikes in job and much more. This will be submitted through internet and reviewed. This corrects hiring realities: weak candidates fudge the truth and excessive time is consumed to study resumes and weak candidates are being interviewed. The snapshot will get necessary information to choose right candidates for the job. And you’d have the perfect team working with you.

Great leaders know that high performers can execute a mediocre strategy successfully. Low performers will weaken a brilliant strategy. However, it is possible to produce great results with a mediocre team. Because having a monopoly, patent protection, colossally weak competitors, or lobbyists gives competitive advantage. Sometimes, it is not the fault of people’s performance that the business fails.

It is possible to have all high performers and fail, because the CEO insists on making use of wrong strategy. It ends up with the organization’s culture being in-bred and lame, someone steals the IP, or markets being dried up with a burp in the economy. In conclusion, a team should be 90% high performers and 10% average performers. However, most of the time, talents do win. The team works best with strategy presented by the CEO being efficient enough to supply positive result. It might be best to have meetings with other directors to create profitable results.