As a business coach of 22 years, the number one limitation that I have seen in growing most businesses is issues around team.

In New Zealand, a quick search shows that we have a lot of 6-10 person business teams, in fact around 80% of our business are around this size.

A rule of thumb we were taught when I trained as a business coach was that it takes around 5 team to absorb the effect of one under-performing team member in the business. So, if you have one bad apple, your business is most likely running with three round wheels and one square wheel, in other words, it’s a rough ride.

So, let’s stop there and take a look at what a business is. One handy definition I like is a Commercial Profitable Enterprise That Works Without You… that’s right, run without YOU… if we follow this definition you need to be able to develop your business to run if your can’t or don’t want to be there all the time.

In his best-selling book on small business The Emyth Revisited, Michael Gerber states that there are several simple-to-explain steps, but not easy to do things, that we need to do in order to achieve profitability and success.

Paraphrased, it goes something like this:

1. Decide exactly what you want from your business and what the business must give to you and your customers, suppliers and team members.
2. Create great systems.
3. Hire good team to run these systems. This includes sales and marketing systems.

Sounds simple, and it is, but most people don’t spend enough time working ON their business, instead spend too much time working IN their business. Working ‘IN’ is doing too much operational stuff in the business and not enough on strategy stuff.

Assuming that we can develop this model (and I’ve seen over and over it working well in developing businesses in my role as a business coach), getting great team on board is a must. I believe it’s the golden part, the part that almost always guarantees the success. Think McDonalds and other well-run franchises (business systems), where the team follow the systems and even with a modest product (cheap hamburgers & fries) there is a great and successful business model.

There are several key parts of attracting, training and keeping good team.

They include:

1. Hiring on attitude and not skills… that’s right… a graduate accountant or just out of school team member for a retail shop with a great attitude, can be more easily trained, than a skilful experienced person who comes with an average or bad attitude. You can train and increase the skill level of the person with a great attitude. You can’t teach good attitude.
2. Use psychometric testing techniques like DISC profiling to match the “happy place” or fit of your employee with the kind of role you have. Don’t put quiet, shy people (introverts) in a front-line customer service role, when the role requires an outgoing person. Instead, that introverted person may be a perfect fit in a high detail role with little customer interaction. I worked for an insurance broker for over a decade, and we found that we could predict a successful hire about 75% of the time using DISC profiling.
3. Lastly, a key area of ensuring the highest performance of a team member is the leadership skill of you the owner and your manager. It’s very important to train your leaders, as leaders are made, not born! Some great literature here includes books like The One Minute Manager and The 5 Temptations of a CEO.

Understanding how to treat people and lead them will increase the odds of them following your systems and looking after the customers, their fellow team, the suppliers, you the owner. For more information on DISC Profiling, good recruiting processes or to receive 1 free DISC personality profile, email Mark today.

By Mark Daniels, from the heart, no AI used