Throughout my career as a leader, manager, and coach, I’ve followed one key guiding principle when it comes to organizational development: Build a World-Class Team. That truly is my mission and I say it without hyperbole or exaggeration.
As part of a fully remote organization for the last decade, I’ve had the luxury of being able to find the best and the brightest, regardless of their geographic location. I can say with confidence that the team that we’ve assembled is one of the best in the business.
These days everyone is talking about digital transformation. Last year, businesses that hadn’t already invested in or made significant progress toward digital transformation had to make up for lost time. Even traditional brick-and-mortar operations had to quickly shift gears and move their operations into the digital realm. Two years ago, could you have imagined placing your order online, driving to Target, announcing your arrival in their app on your phone, and having an associate drop your purchases into your trunk — while you wait in the car?
Those of us who provide strategy and technology services in support of helping companies achieve digital transformation are experiencing a period of unprecedented growth and opportunity. Being able to capitalize on this opportunity for rapid growth while staying true to my guiding principle of building a world-class team, however, has certainly presented some unique challenges. For others who may be going through something similar, I’d like to share some of the things that I reflect on each and every day in order to stay true to that mission.
1. Never compromise.
This one can be tough. When you’re under so much pressure to grow quickly, while continuing to provide the same high level of support to your clients and fellow colleagues, you may feel pressured to hire someone as soon as possible to help lighten the load. It may be tempting to pick the candidate who most closely meets your requirements, even though they still fall short.
There have been times when I’ve had to perform that calculus while interviewing people. Maybe someone hit the eightieth percentile of what I was looking for, but they weren’t quite the right fit. There was such a strong need to bring people onto the team, though, that I started to second guess my hesitation because of that external pressure. This is when it becomes really easy to make a hasty hiring decision you’ll later regret.
Most people have either hired or had to work with someone who wasn’t the right fit. Maybe you take a leap of faith that an individual can quickly grow into the role, but they don’t. Or, maybe they don’t mesh well with the company culture and your team, and they end up sowing division instead of moving things forward. Regardless, everyone ultimately pays the price. If you end up having to part ways anyway after you’ve gone through all that time and effort to interview, onboard, and integrate them with the team, you’ll have to start the process all over again — and deal with a drop in team morale to boot.
To ensure you’re bringing on the highest quality teammates, don’t give in to pressure around accelerating hiring. Always stay true to your mission and values, even when — especially when — times are challenging.
2. Ensure skill diversification.
When only one team member “owns” a particular skill, you’re up a creek if they get sick, take vacation, or leave the organization. Or, you may lose out on additional client opportunities because your single expert is dedicated to another project for the next six weeks.
It’s so important to create redundancy across skillsets in order to maintain the quality of service you’re known for providing. With that goal in mind, I approach skill diversification from two perspectives:
- Cross-train from within. Don’t wait until you’re faced with the temporary or permanent loss of your single expert resource. Provide cross-training to other members of your organization to ensure that you have the capability to support that particular function or skill with other internal resources if necessary.
- Look for the X Factor. As you interview potential candidates, look for what they bring to the table above and beyond their core competency. Someone may be a Marketo expert, but also have deep data analytics or SQL coding skills. As a hiring manager, it’s important to look for any additional skills someone may bring to the table to create additional redundancy within the organization.
Recently, I was looking to bring on a solutions architect. I had two very strong candidates. Both were experts in the platform. Both had deep and broad experience. One candidate, however, had some really unique and interesting development and coding skills. While that’s not a requirement for the day-to-day role, it creates a safety net or redundancy should the organization ever need it.
3. Provide order and structure. / Create a consistent onboarding experience.
As an organization grows and scales, you may move from an environment where you’re only bringing one person on board every other month or so to one where you’re bringing on a dozen people or more every six weeks. Providing a consistent onboarding experience — one that is repeatable, scalable, and optimized to set your new hires up for success — helps ensure those new employees all have the same experience and all feel like they’re part of the same team.
This is an important topic for us right now as a rapidly growing organization. So important that we have an individual whose sole focus is on the employee experience, from the very first time we communicate with that individual all the way through the onboarding process and their entire tenure with our company.
There’s a benefit to providing an order and structure to the employee experience as new hires come on board and become high-performing members of the team. Leaving it up to each individual hiring manager not only creates extra work; they may also have their own idea of what that onboarding experience looks like. That can cause a disjointed experience where new employees don’t understand the larger mission, don’t feel connected to the rest of the organization, and don’t have all the necessary information they need to be successful.
4. Create a shared sense of something bigger.
During periods of rapid growth, it’s all too easy to stay head’s down and focused on the tactical. That’s when you can’t see the proverbial forest for the trees. You run the risk of looking up one day and asking yourself, “Where are we going? What does success even look like?”
This process begins with a consistent employee onboarding experience, as I mentioned earlier, so that each new hire understands what your mission is as an organization and what they can do to help achieve it. But, strong leadership must continually reinforce it in order to make it stick. Leaders must weave the company’s mission, culture, vision, and values into everything they do. Every communication. Every touchpoint. Every All Hands Meeting. If you don’t, people will assume it no longer applies and will follow someone else’s lead…wherever it may take them.
When each and every person understands your goals and aspirations as an organization, they know exactly what they need to do to contribute to the success of the organization, their team, and their own individual success. When you have a shared vision and sense of purpose, you’re all rowing toward the same North Star.
I’d love to hear how are you managing your organization’s plans for rapid growth. Please share in the comments below.
Tom Svec, Principal/Partner at BDO Digital, has spent over 20 years in the B2C and B2B Marketing Technology and Operations space. With deep experience in Marketing Technology and building high-performing teams, Tom is able to combine and focus these passions to drive success for our team and our clients. Tom is certified as an Eloqua Master and Revenue Lifecycle Master, a Marketo Certified Technical Consultant, and a Salesforce Certified Administrator.
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