Assembling the Team: How to Get the Right People Into the Right Roles in Your Business

One of the most important things to do BEFORE you start assembling a team to work on a particular project for your business is to gain a better understanding of your options. In particular, you'll want to take a long, hard look at each employee and see what they bring to the table in a way that nobody else quite matches.

Every one of your employees has a strength - something they do better than anyone else. Assembling a team requires you to temporarily think less about who they are as a whole and more about how you can use their particular, unique strength as a tool to service a much larger goal. Take marketing, for example. A standard promotional flyer essentially has two core elements: the visual design and the language being used. If your team consists of two people and both of them are expert graphic designers, you will likely end up with something that LOOKS fantastic but that isn't actually as effective as you need it to be when communicating a message. If you match up your best graphic designer with someone who truly has a way with words, on the other hand, now you're cooking with gas.

Is this a gross oversimplification of the situation? Sure, but the underlying truth is incredibly relevant - you need to identify what is truly unique about a person and put them in an environment where that talent can shine.

Putting the Pieces Together

Once you've identified some of the unique talents that your employees possess, the next step invariably becomes putting all of those disparate elements together to form a more cohesive whole. It can be helpful to think of this process a bit like putting together a baseball team. Even though everyone loves a good home-run hitter, not every single person in a lineup is a power slugger. A few batters are known for their home runs, while others are known for dependability. Sometimes you don't want a home run at all - sometimes you need someone who you know is going to get to first base nine times out of ten. Other times you need speed - after all, those bases aren't going to steal themselves.

The point is that you're trying to put together employees who aren't JUST high quality, meaning they not only bring something unique to the table, but their skills also compliment everyone else's. In the context of your business, a team needs to be exactly that - a collection of people who are great on their own, but when they all focus their talents together on the same goal are practically unstoppable. Making sure that you understand how these talents not only work, but work TOGETHER, is one of the biggest things to focus on in this regard.

At the end of the day, assembling the perfect team for your business and getting the right people into the right roles is less about the people themselves and more about your own perspective on the situation. Provided that you enter into the situation from the right angle, know how to identify and bring out the core qualities of these employees, and understand how they all fit together to form a cohesive whole, you'll be creating the type of situation where success isn't a matter of "if," but "when."