One question that usually escapes the minds of most entrepreneurs today is: Is there anything else I need to do once I have all the funding and market research that I require before I hit the start button? It so happens that attracting top talent and retaining them through the initial months and years is for sure, one of the true catalysts for ensuring success for your start-up. Why is a strong core team indispensable?
Firstly, if you do not have a helping hand, you are doing just another job, not growing and not building businesses. Second, crisis management becomes easier with committed people present. Third, ideas, culture and stability can only develop if a team is present. In a word, manage to un-manage as fast as possible. Delegate, grow the business and let your best people work.
The best top teams emerge from a blend of motivation, culture, shared growth and challenge. Culture is often key to good hiring and retention. This leads to commitment, which comes from a cause. People with a will and the aspiration to do great things and cause change are more likely to bring with them the requisite passion and tend to stick through thick and thin.
Remember, however, sometimes you need to fire. Or at least let go. Not everyone will stay forever and in some cases, you will need to let people go as nod to your own mis-judgement or to factors emerging from a new operating market environment. People are not bad, often times they outlive their utility and their passion.
When getting the top team together, be sure to have a set of people, ‘the Advisory Board’ who have more experience and exposure than you do and use that to kick-start the team build process. Hire from known sources, consider temps if your budgets or confidence is moderate and remember that no hire is better than a bad hire as far as the A-team staffing goes.
Start-ups face the challenge of churn always. That is a true and a not-so-sad fact of this universe, let’s accept that. However, minimizing this is possible. The foundation of retention is ideas. Let people think, plan and take acceptable risks. As a business owner, your job should not be to enforce your will. It should be to see that hierarchies lose in the face of stellar ideation. Be flexible in your approach, stay open to suggestions, communicate and share, and always, always, build and be seen as building future prospective leaders.
A primary goal that any start-up sets up for itself is growth and viability. The same goals should also inspire the A-team. For your key people to come together, participating in transformation change and letting them be motivated to further inspire the many other who shall duly follow them is critical to the longevity of any business. ‘A’ Teams are the inner dynamic core of a start-up. They need to be stabilized and moderated, the heat and warmth of success them come but naturally.
