Early on in my journey, I realised that I couldn’t do it all. That to offer a well-rounded service and create a strong offering, I would need to surround myself with people who were skilled and experienced in the areas I wasn’t. People who had different life experiences and came at things from a different perspective.
It’s tempting to hire the people who remind you of…well, you… but having a lot of mini-me’s running around doesn’t make for a balanced team!
Conflict is crucial to creativity, innovation and inclusion
Having a team of people with diverse skills, experiences and backgrounds can get a bit messy.
There will be disagreements, sometimes even with you! But I know that any time my team clashed over what the right approach to something was, we all came away learning something new. We often came out of these conversations with new ideas and perspectives.
One way we met the communication challenges was by taking DiSC profiling. For example, if person A and person B had frequent clashes, the profiling helped us see that person A was driven by the impact a choice would have on people, while person B was focused on the numbers.
By understanding that we all have different motivations that influence our behaviour and communication style, we were able to give each other some slack instead of getting stuck in the conflict.
Yes, things can get a bit messy with all of these different perspectives, but that’s okay!
How to create a strong team by recruiting for your weaknesses
- Identify gaps in the team. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your current team? Give people the space and the resources to shine at what they’re good at and look at ways you can take the things they don’t excel at off their plates.
- Think strategically about hiring. Hire for your existing team’s weaknesses. If your existing team is very creative or sales-focused, they might be less skilled at attending to the fine details of projects, or in analysing data. So you might want to look for a completer-finisher for your team. By hiring to create more balance in the team you’ll be creating a stronger team overall.
- Relinquish control. Entrepreneurs tend to have their hands in everything at the start, and often find it hard to let go of tasks. But by stepping aside and letting members of the team have a go, you’re building resilience in your business, and helping to create confident team members. You hired them because they’re good at something you’re not, value that and trust them to do their job well.
- Take this attitude to your partner relationships. When you bring on an agency to help with something specific, like PR, human resources, IT etc., they will have skills and experience in those areas that you probably don’t. Look for partners that aren’t afraid to say “no” to you, or to tell you when an idea won’t work.
Sometimes we know that we have weaknesses, but we don’t really know what they are. We can get this insight by asking for feedback from our teams – and creating an environment of psychological safety where they know they can tell you their true thoughts without getting into trouble for it.
Once we know what areas we need some help with, we can go out and find the people who’ll shine in those areas and build a stronger team.
