9 tips for building a dream team for a startup

Why a skateboard champion without work experience may be more useful for a startup than a middling specialist? Marina Treshchova, CEO of Fast Lane Ventures, gives 9 tips to aspiring entrepreneurs on building a dream team.

The main goal of any new entrepreneur is to create an effective business. No matter how brilliant you are, alone it will not work. The future of the company depends on who you hire as associates. It was colleagues, not employees. To be professional and to do a good job with your work is a necessary, but not sufficient requirement.

Working in a startup is not an easy task, requiring a strain of mental and physical strength, increased dedication and often a change in life priorities. In such a situation, money is weighty, but not the main motivator. To work with full dedication, a person must have a soul for the cause. Your task is to find and keep just such people, to form a dream team. Here are some fundamental rules that will help you do this.

Hire the best

The main rule - do not save on professionals. Yes, they cost more, they are more difficult to interest and retain, but the effectiveness of their work will cover all costs. You do not have to control every step, waste time explaining and correcting other people's mistakes, perform their work for them, eventually changing the composition and starting training anew. It is better to take one super-specialist than two "middle peasants". Distributing the budget available to you, divide it into two parts. One of them will go to the team, the other - to everything else.
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Look for heroes

Look for not only those who know how to do something well or even very well, look for those who have achieved outstanding success. At least in anything. Let it be skateboarding or crocheting. This is not a self-sufficient criterion, but a person who has achieved outstanding success in any business is more likely to sit up sleepless nights over your project and are less likely to go halfway. After all, he has already proved that he knows how to invest the maximum work and energy in his chosen work and achieve the goal. And then it depends on you in many respects - whether you can succeed in captivating him with new heroism.

Become for a while HR Director

The deeper your involvement in the recruitment process, the more likely you are to find exactly what you need. Not even the most competent HR team will form a team for you. He will be able to adequately assess his professional experience, but he will not be able to “feel” a person, his energy potential, and readiness to work in conditions of high speeds and tight deadlines. Only you as a manager are able to understand how much the applicant is suitable for you not only by professional, but also by personal qualities, is there a chance to work together, how developed is the "fighting spirit" in him. At the stage of forming the key team of your business, you will have to take over the HR function.

Play Ambitions

Good staff hard to get. But even harder to keep them. Usually they do not experience difficulties in finding work, and salary does not always become the main motivator when choosing a new place. What can you offer these people? Of course, the challenge, non-standard tasks, the possibility of self-realization! The main motivator of the transition of people to startups is their own ambitions and ambition. Use them for good. As a leader, your task is to turn hard deadlines, increased loads and high speeds into a challenge to professional qualities, an incentive for creativity and the search for non-standard solutions. It doesn’t matter what we are talking about - changing the design or increasing the KPI in terms of sales. Your task is to add excitement, to kindle a fighting spirit, to teach people to enjoy the work done and move forward. In the end, it is for this that they came here!

Do not isolate departments from each other.

The next step is the organization of effective work. For a startup, the optimal structure is one that assumes the active involvement of various specialists in solving common business problems. From the first days of the project’s life, it is impossible to allow different departments to turn into “islands” focused exclusively on solving their own problems. We have, for example, the development of an IT platform is always conducted with the active involvement of marketing specialists. They describe what the needs of the market and consumers should be in it. Product managers join the solution of the problem and immediately “translate” market terminology into the IT language. Such interaction sooner or later gives a synergistic effect. Understanding the needs of a business, an IT professional can, in turn, propose improvements that will help more effectively build the work of marketers.

Do not be afraid to change people

It happens that people work well, but not 100% as you would like. And you reconcile with this, believing that this is better than nothing. Relying on such "middling", you risk and leave your startup in the same category. Try to honestly answer yourself the question: if I recruited the team again, would you choose the same people? If the answer is "yes", look for another reason: maybe you have set priorities incorrectly or you have not optimally organized the workflow. If the answer is "no" - proceed before it is too late.
Everyone has the right to make mistakes, but if he is not able to analyze the shortcomings and repeats the same mistakes, it is better to dismiss him. This applies to you. With the difference that your “dismissal” from the business will be a direct result of your indecision and inability to make tough decisions.

Take the fire on yourself

At the stage of developing a new business, the team is usually still small, and the amount of work, on the contrary, tends to infinity. And no matter how well you set goals and prioritize, you will have to control almost every step, take part in each business process and ultimately be responsible for every achieved (or unachieved) result. Somewhere the functional is flawed, technical flaws emerge, sales go at the wrong speed, in the end the business slows down. Who is guilty? Technical Director? Sales Manager? No, only the leader.

Even if there are several partners in a startup, when it comes time to make difficult decisions, the team should know whose word will be the last. There is a huge burden of responsibility on your shoulders: in front of the team, investors, consumers, your family and yourself. There is only one recipe - please be patient and philosophical view of life. Ultimately it is your choice.

Delegate authority

Being responsible for your business still does not mean doing everything yourself. But we should not forget that, delegating some work to another person, you need to delegate and the right to make decisions. Do not constantly interfere with the work of your subordinates and drag the blanket over yourself, regardless of the complexity and urgency of the situation. Experience shows that with the development of business, team building and growth of mutual trust, total control by the leader weakens, and the consciousness of employees grows. Do not try to slow down this process.

Do not change your principles

Of course, each of us has our own ideas about what is good and what is bad. Talking about ethics and morality in business is a thankless task. Everyone just has a trait for which you can never enter. And everyone has it different. Someone will not flinch, dismissing the father of five children, and someone will be tormented by conscience because he raised his voice to the subordinate. There can be no advice for all occasions. It happens that difficult times come, requiring difficult decisions.

There is a good way to understand if you can step on your principles: imagine that you need to go out and justify your choice in front of an audience full of people. If you do not falter, it means that you are firmly confident in your decision, it means it comes from the inside and it means it is correct. Not at all, but for you and your business. Clearly follow your beliefs. Be sure of yourself.

And finally - love the people who work for you, try to make their lives better in all available ways. And they will surely answer you and your business in return!

Original article on Forbes.ru