Bootstraps & Bicycles: Part IV

​Investing in Your Team
The story goes that a CEO and CFO were discussing the future of their company.
The CFO said to a CEO, “Can we afford to invest in our people?”
The CEO responded, “Can we afford not to?”
The CFO says, “What happens if we invest in our people and they leave us?”
The CEO replied, “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?”
Anyone who has built a team knows that finding the right people is just the first step. As Jim Collins wrote in Good to Great and Gino Wickman reiterated in Traction, the next step is to get the right people in the right seats.
By this time, I am assuming you are at least interested in understanding your strengths, so you now know, or have a good guess, which seat you need to sit in to bring the most value to your business. If you know where you are sitting, then you know what seats are empty. Finding the team members to fill those seats is the first challenge. The second is making sure you have them in the right seats, so they generate the most return on your investment—and on theirs.
People hired just to fill a seat will end up being in the way and slowing down our progress. A well vetted team member put in the right seat can take us places we haven’t even imagined yet.
Investing in our team will mirror much of our personal journey to identifying our strengths and seating ourselves in the position in our business where we are generating the most ROI for our time and energy. The following are some additional ideas:

• Use personality profiling to facilitate understanding of communication styles, project management, decision making paradigms, team conflict resolution, etc..
  • WARNING: Personality profiling should never be a limiting experience, leaving team members with excuses for negative behavior and narrow mindsets. Rather it should be an empowering and enlightening experience that fosters personal and team growth.
• Develop individual professional development plans, both short and long term, so you can encourage and empower your team to develop along their career paths.
• Send your team to subject matter specific conferences and seminars. One of the best experiences of the last 12 months was taking my operations team to a legal conference and debriefing with them over lunch and dinner everyday. The experience left them inspired and more invested in the success of each other, our attorneys, and the firm as a whole.
• Take time to touch base with each team member at least once a month—this can be harder as you grow, but it is well worth the effort. Whether over coffee in the office or at an impromptu lunch, the investment of your personal time and energy in the professional lives of your team will pay dividends in increased moral and help you proactively identify issues before they become problems.
• Keep your team accountable. While a free-range team can sound appealing, it places your hard-earned reputation, on lease to your team, at risk. Regularly meet with your team to provide:
  • Clarity. Ensure everyone clearly understand what needs to be done next. If it cannot be stated in actionable steps, it is not clear enough.
  • Support. Provide a sounding board, insight, decision making, and resources to accomplish the next action step(s).
  • Accountability. Ensuring that action steps are being taken, recognizing when they are completed, and setting clear expectation, and sometimes consequences, if they are unreasonably being delayed.
• Encourage your team to find peers and mentors in their subject matter field outside of the business. Then provide them time to meet with them.
  • When the only voice they are hearing is ours, our team can get selective hearing. Encourage your team to workshop with peers from their subject matter field and find a mentor inside their subject matter field who will push them on their professional growth.
  • Set timeframes for those meeting and have them report to you and your team what they are learning. Those meetings can challenge, provide validation, and generate professional development that you will not be able to on your own.
  • Lastly, if it is good for your team, it is good for you too. Challenge yourself to look for peers and a mentor that you can talk with.

There are a so many ways we can engage with and invest in our teams. As leaders of our business, no matter what seat we sit in, if we don’t take time to invest in our teams, we are squandering our greatest assets.
A well invested in team can take us to the next level of success and satisfaction. If we invest in our team and keep putting people in the right seats, we are going to find that while our business is doing more than ever before, we may be doing less. This may result in a unique situation of asking, “What do I do next?”