Find adaptable people
If you’re going to trust employees to break down a broad goal, you need to start with the right kind of people. Shah looks for adaptable employees who will be able to make adjustments as they track their progress toward a goal.
“Because the world is changing so fast, we wanted to make sure that the people we hire are adaptable to the changes and they don’t mind multitasking,” he says. “If you have adaptable people, you can adapt them to the changes much faster.”
Look for signs in candidates’ backgrounds that suggest they’ve had to adapt before: transferring colleges, relocating for jobs, being promoted to a new position at the same company or simply switching jobs.
During the employee’s first three months, Shah keeps a close watch to determine their strengths and reveal their weaknesses.
“When an employee’s new to the company, most people don’t realize that that’s the time they are ready to adapt to the company’s core culture and make whatever changes are necessary,” says Shah, who uses the three-month evaluation to ask employees to work on one or two weaknesses. “If you don’t pay attention to the first three months, a lot of things get set in their mind, and then it becomes more difficult to change what they’re doing.”
During that first evaluation, Shah also listens to employees’ self-assessed strengths. If those aren’t being tapped, he may give them additional tasks to test their aptitude in other departments. You know they’re in the right spot when they stop requiring much help and instead start encouraging other employees in their tasks.
“Every musical instrument vibrates at the natural frequency and produces beautiful sound. You don’t need much energy when somebody dances at natural frequency,” says Shah, borrowing from his mechanical engineering terminology. “It becomes the source of energy. So similarly, rather than consuming energy, [employees] become a source of energy to other employees.”
Once they’re in place, Shah teams employees up by specialties: sales teams, which are generally geographically based; product teams, which are determined by end use, such as countertops or landscape; or service teams, which are divided into functionalities like accounting or shipping. Each is decked with a fancy name — like Topaz Team, Emerald Team or Sapphire Team — to give employees a sense of ownership when they talk about their team.
Shah designates a leader in each team. To find your top players, go back to the initial hiring criteria of adaptability and multitasking. Shah examines how they’ve performed so far, looking beyond execution to examine how well they’ve adjusted to new product lines or new customers.
Shah does consider the chemistry of the people he puts together, but the team’s needs trump personality types. He relies on their adaptability to make up for it. Beyond that, the common goal glues each team together.
“Most teams work together much better if there is a bigger enemy, and that bigger enemy is the goal,” Shah says. “By working together, we will meet that challenge.”
