Mold your team. What I’ve tried to do is sit down with the individual as they come in and say, ‘This is the vision for the company. It’s not lip service. This is really where we want to go and what we want to do.’
Probably in this job market, that new employee just wants a job and they’ll say, ‘Yeah, OK, I’ll play the game.’ That will be the toughest thing to discern. Is that employee genuine or not? Are they just on the team because they need a job or do they really buy in to what that job is? Time will really tell.
You don’t know until you see the interplay of the team how someone is going to work out. You have to hire for the talent, but long term, you keep them because they buy in to the vision and the goals and they fit on the team.
Support your team. There have been decisions by the team that have been made that I’ve gone along with when I thought it was probably not the best decision at the time. And it has sometimes turned out that I probably should have steered it in a slightly different way.
But the flip side is when the senior management team buys in to a decision, everybody starts rowing in that direction. The team going in the same direction is more important than getting the exact nuance of what I may have thought would have been the best way to get there. That has happened numerous times.
You have to let the team learn. Sometimes they can make a wrong decision and it’s not going to damage the company too much and you say, ‘All right, let’s see where that goes.’ If it would have really been an important thing, you would have said, ‘No, we’re not going there.’
Learn to hold back. Early in the game, I would put too much input into the team. This was four years ago. They would say, ‘OK, Jake wants to go in this direction; we have to do that.’ I had to learn to back out of putting my decisions on the table until the very end. I pretty much let the team decide now what’s going on.
I will add input because occasionally there are some pieces either from past experience that I’ve had that they didn’t know or they didn’t have anyone else on the team that could put those couple of pieces in.
When we’re doing an acquisition, because I’ve done a lot of them personally, there are some skill sets that I have that no one else on the table really has. Do you understand this could be a potential issue or this could be a potential regulatory issue or this could be something else? But I really don’t want to skew the input unless it’s going in a really crazy direction that isn’t going anywhere good for anybody.
I tend to sit back and let the interplay of the team members decide the direction. They come up with some great solutions.
How to reach: AnazaoHealth Corp., (800) 995-4363 or www.anazaohealth.com
