There is no “I” in team. But there is a heck of a lot more.
Todd Lazenby, the founder and managing partner of Victory Partners LLC, has been building teams in large and small business settings throughout his executive career. He’s seen the qualities that exist on a good business team — among them, an ability to focus on a uniform set of goals, a willingness on the part of individuals to put the best interests of the team first and an open-minded approach to problem-solving.
“If you build a team to be kind of a utility team, where you’re cross-training that team even at the senior management levels, then you get better cross-functionality, better cross-pollination of ideas,” Lazenby says. “For middle-market companies and larger companies, I’ve always found that to be the very best approach.”
Effective team-building is one of the main reasons Lazenby has been able to continually grow Victory, a firm that generated $10 million in 2008 revenue.
Smart Business spoke with Lazenby about how you can build effective teams at your company.
Form a process. The first thing you have to do is have everybody check their ego at the door. In our situation, we’re hiring many people with master’s level degrees, so everybody is coming with a certain level of ego. We kind of follow a ‘forming, norming, storming, performing’ model. First, you put the team together, and a lot of that rests on you hiring good people.
Another part of the equation is to hire people who come from very diverse backgrounds. One of the things we do not do is we do not bring in people who have homogenous skills. We want very diverse skill sets. Then we literally force them to start working together. So you have some of that storming going on in the beginning. You, as the CEO, help to affect that storming by mitigating it, pointing out when people are being unfair to one another or are taking things personally, letting their egos creep in.
I find that by managing the team that way, they start to become cohesive at a much faster rate, and most importantly, because they’re playing different roles, I show them how their overall role effects the overall organization, how the role they play impacts both the revenue and the bottom line.
Recruit team builders. The mentoring begins in the recruiting process. It takes us about four months to recruit somebody, and we have a very strict recruiting methodology where they have to go through five layers, and they have to pass the fitness test in terms of fitting in with the culture, but they also have to go through and indicate that they have demonstrable skills that will work in our industry.
We put them in situations where they actually have to demonstrate in a real-world situation that they can handle what it is they’re signing up to do. They are mentored through that process. For every level, we give them feedback on how they performed; we give them feedback on our culture and what they can do to continue to improve as they go through the process.
Once they’re on board, we assign a mentor to them. I get feedback from each of the mentors regarding how that new hire is progressing, and I take the time to spend one on one with each of the individuals and find how they’re doing. Everybody has a steep learning curve, so I want to know how they’re finding their learning curve, do they feel like they have the resources available to them to assist them in achieving what they need to achieve. If not, we ask them for their suggestions on additional resources we can provide.
