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If you are building your marketing or your operations team and needed to hire some contributors, how would you go about it? Would you look to hire only the ones with the best degrees and greatest skill sets? Or would you look for the way they potential candidates work together and their potential to grow?
While skill set is essential to a person’s strength as a candidate, it’s also important to consider how they will interact and contribute to a team.
The productivity and dedication of your team can ultimately determine long-term productivity, the potential for strike, turnover rates, and more.
- Establish How They Define Leadership
It’s important to know how your potential candidates define leadership. How a person defines leadership regarding position, power, and influence will impact how they treat their peers.
If a person considers positional power the root of leadership, they might get into conflict with their supervisors, and instigate a hostile culture within their team.
However, if they believe in shared leadership—leading by calling on the contribution of others, they might be more likely to foster a healthy and collaborative culture.
A few ways a hiring manager could get an indication of the candidate’s leadership style are:
- Ask them for an example or two of how they demonstrated leadership in a role.
- Create a hypothetical scenario involving a difficult situation, and ask them how they would handle it as a leader.
- Depending on the length of your hiring process, have them complete a leadership test or quiz.
- During the interview, instruct the candidate to work with someone on your panel to carry out an activity, difficult task, or something surprising (i.e., reenacting a movie scene) and observe how they tackle it.
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- Have Team Building Exercises/Retreats
This is especially important when you first create your team. You want each of your members to come into the workplace not only with a real sense of their individual contributions but how they will work with others.
Getting to know each other on a more personal or value-centered level will help your team familiarize with each other so that they can develop a sense of trust and confidence in the projects they collaborate on in the future.
Your team building retreat should reflect the culture of your organization. So, you could choose from a range of activities, including:
- A simple dinner and drinks
- Something adventurous, like completing the Escape Room
- Going to a park such as WildPlay to complete challenging courses together
- A seminar day dedicated to exploration of each other’s values and visions
- One-On-One Check-Ins
As a supervisor or team leader, it is important to stay up to date with where your members are in terms of their goals, emotions, and more. Not only will this give you insight into the conflict that has arisen or could arise in your team, but it also aids in the growth and development of your members.
In the long run, you will be able to demonstrate that you actually care about your team, mitigate conflict, and track their progression and growth in the organization.
If you make this a regular appointment—occurring perhaps once a month or bi-monthly, you create an ongoing culture of reflection and operating with a growth mindset.
Building an all-star team might not be the simplest task in the world, but when you can do so, it benefits your organization as a whole. It helps your company grow, and not to mention, increases overall productivity.
By orienting your focus to how your team performs as a unit instead of hiring them for their individual qualities only, you ensure that your organization truly maximizes the potential of your human capital.
About Arash Asli:
Arash Asli is at the forefront of business growth. As Co-founder and CEO of Yocale, he has a unique blend of technology, business development, corporate, and finance experience. Arash is honored to have been named the Business in Vancouver’s Top Forty under 40 business executive. http://www.yocale.
