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We often underestimate the importance of building world-class teams in our scaling efforts. You can’t hire a world-class team. There are no tricks or shortcuts—you have to build them. But building such teams effectively is easier said than done.
Teams are a jigsaw puzzle of various personalities and strengths that you need to piece together to succeed. When you do it right, your wins will stack, your corporation will grow, and your culture will thrive.
To deal with a problem, you would like to assess and understand the attitudes, mindset, and personality of each individual in order to properly match them to the problem at hand.
Collecting information about personality
I’m increasingly convinced that A) it is harder to change people’s mindsets and B) mindsets matter a lot when we think about what it takes to build great teams.
My co-founder and I have built some really great teams, but we have also fallen short because we haven’t matched the personality/attitude and skills of individuals to the right jobs. Having the right people in the right roles has catapulted us through every product launch, growth phase, and market shift. As a company grows, it’s especially necessary to understand your people.
The information gathering process should start in the recruiting phase. Ask open-ended questions about the prospect’s profession. Is he generally optimistic? Does he approach tasks with confidence? What excites him? How does he deal with adversity? You’ll quickly discover that not everyone wants to be in an early-stage startup or even a late-stage scale-up.
Taking personality tests — although a less personal method — may also show you how to get quick results.
Once hired, encourage managers and other organizational leaders to take the time to really get to know their employees. Scheduling regular check-ins or even short outings outside of labor (who doesn’t love an afternoon coffee run?) are great ways to build these connections. Pay attention to what situations employees thrive in, but just as necessary, what they avoid and what other personality aspects drive them.
This information is a great start line for matching employees to the right jobs in your organization. But at my company, Wistia, we discovered we would have liked a more formal framework to equip our leadership team, which led us to the American West.
Pioneers vs. Settlers vs. City Builders
Not literally, but we drew inspiration from the American West—yes, think Oregon Trail—to create a system that helps categorize different personality types into business phases. The result was pioneers, settlers, and city builders. Each has their very own unique role to play and value to add to the growing business.
- Pioneers are risk-takers who are willing to enterprise into the unknown. They will do anything to find something of value, and for this reason, they often succeed in early-stage startups.
- Settlers are more risk averse. They are driven by implementing some initial structure and building a community around a guaranteed opportunity or an idea discovered by a pioneer. But they feel less at home as the business grows and the “town” turns into a large “city” with more complex systems.
- City Builders shine when tasked with creating more laws, rules, and paths as your corporation grows. They can show you how to build and expand an infrastructure that can scale with your corporation over the long run.
And every once in a while you will find someone well-rounded enough to succeed at every stage. Stick with them so long as you’ll be able to.
Every company will have its pioneers, settlers, and city builders. Regardless of the theme, the concepts remain the same. This system helps us higher match employees to the right roles for their personality at whatever stage of the company we are at. This helps teams, and ultimately our business, grow.
Even after nearly two a long time of trying to solve the human puzzle, we still learn something latest every day. But there’s no denying that when you get the right people working on the right problems at the right time, things start to work. With great teams, you’ll be able to move much faster and smarter as a company.
Entrepreneurs who quickly recognize how people work have the best probability of putting the right people in the right positions to scale. It doesn’t occur overnight. It takes investment from management to get to know your people and implement the right framework. But if you’re lucky enough to put together a team that’s doing well, don’t let it go. After all, a company is only as strong as its team.