Developing a high-performing team is the most challenging aspect of the expansion, as you have seen through working with CEOs and their expanding businesses. Everybody wants an A-player squad, but you don’t always get one.

Good individuals, in our opinion, are expensive. We fear those kinds of individuals would leave for the next fresh opportunity. Some managers and business owners would like to hire and retain B players to reduce turnover.

You will eventually come to feel that these four factors—which you will learn through your experience working with many teams as a coach, a team member, and a team leader—are crucial to creating an agile and effective team for your expanding organizations:

Here’s How to Build an All-Star Team that’s Highly Engaged

Hire Excellent Candidates First

Rather than focusing only on a person’s skill set, search for smart, hardworking, and [insert your positive attributes] individuals to hire. It’s simple to figure out how to perform something in this day and age because we have access to so much information.

Skills are important, but they might also become obsolete for your expanding firm over time. Additionally, it is even more crucial to have exceptional people before you have a direction because market demands force directions to shift quickly. Therefore, seek out candidates who are quick learners, team players, and followers of leaders.

Establish Your Goal as a Group

Even though I was in a corporate position that suited my skill set and desire, I still left since the organization’s mission did not coincide with mine. Involving your new employees in developing your mission statement and core values is crucial.

If they respect you as a leader and concur with your mission and vision, you should not be concerned about them defecting. The benefit of working with you outweighs the financial considerations.

Establish Alignment

Finding harmony between purpose and passion is essential for increasing work engagement. You won’t need to constantly worry about inspiring your team when you have alignment. Giving your colleagues the chance to pursue their passions is one way to do this.

Imagine being asked to perform at a business gathering by someone who enjoys singing. Pay attention to your people. Show your team that passions can be formed as you become excellent at what you do and make it enjoyable. A highly engaged business is one where passion, purpose, and profit are all in line.

Form a Contract, Not Just a List of Expectations

Making assumptions hinders productivity. Employee burnout is reduced by 41% when managers set clear expectations for their teams. If you believe that a report should be completed in a day, but your team believes it should take a week, expectations have not been set properly. These differences widen as the team expands.

Actual agreements, such as standardized operating procedures, job instructions, and clearly defined roles and responsibilities, will be required as you anticipate increasing. It’s never too early to begin defining more specific expectations.

Developing Specialized Areas

As our company evolved, we reached a turning point where we understood specializations were required. We gradually developed expertise based on the areas with the largest needs from our consumers.

We once had a client service manager in charge of all aspects of an account’s life cycle, such as tickets, implementation, adoption, and more. We split this function into reactive and proactive roles after realizing that this role needed more specialized knowledge.

• Reactive Role – Customer experience managers who clients contact to address bugs, bugs, etc.
• Proactive Role – Customer engagement managers who cultivate customer relationships and administer the accounts from a marketing perspective.

Scale and Specialization-Related Difficulties

Here are a few of the main issues we confronted when it came to scaling and specializations:

Workflows That Are Complex: As the team developed and became more skilled, complex procedures that included more stakeholders were put into action. There can frequently be a significant learning curve when it comes to designing, executing, and maintaining these intricacies.

Ensuring business continuity to prevent clients from suffering throughout the transition was crucial to successfully implementing these new operations. As an illustration, we had to manage the transition from an onboarding manager to a customer success manager while preserving the same level of consistency and respect for the client.

Efficiency Within the Organization: We took the time to assess our new procedures to ensure they didn’t lead to inefficiencies and duplication of effort. Even though we worked quickly, we continually assessed our progress and used statistics to gauge our efficacy and impact.

Every time we introduced a new procedure, we closely monitored our KPIs to determine its impact and made necessary corrections. For instance, we looked at how the workflow modification affected the customer satisfaction score.

Onboarding New Staff: Because we wanted to get new hires up and run as soon as possible, investing in an onboarding process for employees might have slid to the bottom of our priority list. However, in the long term, the onboarding procedure proved essential.

It encouraged productivity, made certain the new teammates felt like team members and fostered drive to perform well in the position.

Final Note:

The secret to business continuity through development is to scale sensibly and deliberately. Your firm can scale up significantly by developing specializations, but you must be aware of the difficulties that may occur and be prepared to address them.