When you are starting out or growing your business there are a number of assets and units of capital you will need in order to help it succeed. But, few of these will ever be more important than your human capital – the people that work for you – and it is your management team who will be responsible for managing both your human capital and your business direction.
As such, that management team are incredibly important and will have an incalculable impact on the future success of your business.
So, how do you make sure you build a good, functional, and effective management team?
Finding the Right People
Recruitment is not an industry all of its own for no reason, the fact is that finding people is hard and finding the right people is even harder. When you are looking for those key people with rare skillsets, drive, ambition and a proven track record, it is even harder.
As such, you can easily find the search long and frustrating and you may even have to work your way through some unsuitable or temporary candidates for the short-term.
The key issue is of course that it is very rare that the most skilled, experienced, and innovative people are actively seeking a role. More often than not they are already in one, which tends to rule out standard recruitment activity like advertising for the positions online.
There are of course head-hunters out there who can be employed to seek out the people who match your exact criteria and approach them on your behalf, however these are never cheap.
One of the most effective ways is of course to work on developing your own network, the more people you can meet, connect with and get to know, the wider your sphere of influence will grow and the more likely it is that you will have direct or indirect connections with exactly the kind of people you need.
Of course, if you are not in this position, you may need to lean on others, employ the services of head-hunters or hope that your company attracts the right kind of people to it.
Ensuring the Right Fit
A vital and key element to the functioning of your management team is a match of personalities as well as a mix of skills.
There is no sense ending up with a team who always agree with each other, that is the quickest way to charge blindly down a dead end, that being said you certainly do not want a team who cannot agree on anything. Either scenario will not be conducive to a successful business.
What you are looking for is something slightly closer to the unanimous end, mixed in with enough differing personality types to ensure actions and decisions will be properly scrutinised and questioned.
At Altitude we use a system known as Talent Dynamics to measure the personality and work-focused leanings of any individual any client of ours wishes to consider including in their team. Talent Dynamics helps you (and the person being assessed) where their real talents lie and therefore what sort of roles are most likely to fit with them. Each report lists the kind of tasks and duties they are likely to take to and which will be alien to their particular way of thinking. This can tell you where in your team they can best fit and who in your team they will work best with. Sometimes opposites really can complement each other.
The important thing here is to focus on more than one element. Just because you happen to like someone that doesn’t mean that others in your team are going to, and they may be a terrible manager in terms of getting the best out of their subordinates, particularly if they are very different talent profiles.
The real key is to make sure that you are not importing problems into your management team, one bad apple on the board can completely ruin the moral of an entire organisation.
Getting Started
If you are at the early stages, maybe you are only just starting out and you have yet to add more than just yourself to the management team? Either way, it will be important to get people in early who can provide value.
Of course, hiring a CFO or CSO before you are even up and running can be financially inconceivable, not to mention rather premature.
Fortunately, at The Altitude Agency we have a vast network of experienced businesspeople, all of whom have years of experience in a variety of industries. Better still, they are willing to help our clients on a part-time basis, adding their expertise, skills, and knowledge to even the most fledgling of businesses.
Our relationships with them means we can get them to offer exceptionally favourable rates for their time and their work – saving you untold thousands.
For more information or to discuss developing your management team please get in touch with us today. Call us on 0203 150 0565 or email info@thealtitudeagency.com.
