Entrepreneurs: learn when to change pace and let go… to grow!
Sunday, October 25th, 2009One of the most pivotal times in the development of a business is that moment when the entrepreneur chooses to go to the next level: to build an organization. It is a time to remember that many of the habits that were so beneficial initially – pioneering, big-picture thinking, risk-taking, forging ahead no matter the obstacles, doing anything and everything it takes to make it go – may now need to be balanced by other skills and energies to create an effective and successful team.
Stepping back and adjusting focus on making the right hires, however, could be an uncomfortable change of pace from the forging ahead full steam pattern you’ve been living. Your pioneering ways may have gotten you off the ground, but it is a strong team that will take you further, and to build one you must recognize that interviewing, training, and developing relationships will take time and effort.
The key to growth is defining who you really need and then finding them, hiring, them and keeping them. But there are pitfalls everywhere. Too often, when first expanding, entrepreneurs will set out to find copies of themselves: persons as energetic, dynamic, willing and risk-taking as they are. They might be duplicating their strengths, but they are then not compensating for their weaknesses.
It is easy to understand the tendency to hire people like yourself: you communicate easier, you tend to motivate similarly, but it can be a trap. Your business needs are not satisfied by duplicating yourself, but rather by complementing your skills and behaviors – a pattern that has worked well for “Yin and Yang” pairs like Bernard Marcus & Arthur Blank, William Hewlett & Dave Packard, Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak – different styles bringing different strengths together to grow their companies from humble beginnings.
Take the time needed to define each position on your new team. No skimping. Strategic planning is useless if you don’t find the right people to execute your gameplan. Finding people with the technical skills is relatively easy: resume, references, etc. The soft skills are a different matter, and are actually more important.
There are great tools available today to match the soft skills of the person with the soft skills appropriate for the job. You can go a step further and motivate each new member of your team by identifying their passions in life; their values, and making sure that between their work and time away from work, they can fulfill those passions.
It takes time to find the right people, more time to train them, and even more time to listen to, adjust and motivate them; but, the rewards are unparalleled. So often the new entrepreneur takes too long to realize that simple replication is not a growth plan, control tactics work only in the short term, and turnover just plain hurts. Performance and productivity are greatly enhanced only when the entrepreneur lets go of one-style “do as I do” thinking and changes to a focus on building teams of complementary behaviors.
Remember: people are the number one resource of a company.
