People are the most important part of your business: both today and in the future. The people in your organization are the face of your company to clients, vendors, and more importantly — future employees. The people you bring into the organization will help you create the legacy you’re dreaming of and the means by which success can thrive. They are your company’s biggest asset, and will most likely be your biggest expense. Nothing you do in your organization will play a more central and lasting role than hiring and growing a successful team.
People will also be the biggest drain on you, both mentally and emotionally as you scale your organization. Yes – people are exhausting. You need to be able to not only ask the hard questions about the people in your organization, but make the hard choices. Not all people you bring in will be successful. The wrong employees will drain your company’s resources, it will affect your customers, and it was destroy your culture. How you respond will make or break your success in scaling your organization — and for some surviving as a company all together.
Do you have the right people?
- If you do – great. It’s time to maximize the role they play in your organization.
- If you don’t – what are you doing to change that?
As we talk about people, we are talking about unraveling the challenges, pitfalls, and frequent oversights we make on the pathway to scaling. We’re going to dive deep into all things people and answer that key question we asked above (Do you have the right people). Over the next series of posts, we’ll discuss:
- Hiring your Team: arguably the hardest part of your work will be selecting how and whom you’ll bring on your team. Missteps here are the most costly and bring the longest (and largest) debt to your organization. We’ll walk you through how to evaluate the skill-set, structure, and fit. We’re talking about the “who” in your team and addressing the “when” to hire.
- Building the Team: we will dive into how onboarding, team dynamics, structure, and company culture play driving roles as your organization scales. We’re not talking solely about culture here (more on that in the future), we’re talking about how we stay in-tune with our people to understand the growing pains, harness the new found energies in new hires, and tap into hidden scaling potential.
- Facing People Challenges: as your company scales, sometimes your people don’t scale with it (or as fast as they need to). We are going to talk about identifying struggling team members, how to respond, and deciding on a resolution path that will allow your company to continue forward. (These are the hard conversations I noted above.) We’ll also talk about how that gets communicate out to your organization.
- Evolving the Organization: our final topic on people starts to overlap with process and policy — we’ll look at how our people evolve in the organization. Some positions (and people as noted above) will go away and some new ones will enter the fold. We will discuss how you’re hiring, training, and employee development needs to shift from generalists to specialists. Finally, we will talk about how the composition of your team evolves, the types of roles you need, the seniority of staff, and start the conversation on culture.
Your team, the people there today and the staff you hire in the future, are the life-blood of your organization. If you’re going to make one investment this year – invest here. The dividends will repay themselves when you’re surrounded by an amazing team.
When it comes to people, it starts with hiring.