What are the top 10% looking for when they are recruited onto existing teams? The place to start is building a team culture you know will be successful and produces high levels of satisfaction for employees.
Trust: Studies clearly indicate that for team players, trust is far more important in building strong teams—teams that deliver success over the long term for a company — than economic incentive.
Interdependence: This value will grow from a sense of community and team support among team members. It involves information-sharing and relying on the strengths of one another that leads to team success rather than simply individual achievement.
Genuineness: In a team culture, genuineness encourages clear communications and transparent motivations among employees and management.
Empathy: Empathy is the ability to imagine When empathetic team members have the desire to do the right thing, then you can know that decisions will be reliably made to protect and preserve the rights of everyone involved in your team culture.
Risk: If the team culture looks at failure as an important step toward team success, it avoids corporate stagnation. In this way, risk becomes the fuel for change and innovation.
Success: If employees are not satisfied, a company will run into trouble when it needs to attract and retain talented employees. Gifted and talented employees will move on if they are not finding satisfaction in your team culture.
I’m a small business owner and I wish to know how do I get those points across my managers and employees. Aside from employee orientation or perhaps monthly meetings, how do I make them understand those are the values I want for my company?
Do you have a guide for small business owners with less than 20 employees? Are there specific guides for the 1st two years of business, first 5 years and so forth?
I’m more comfortable when I start with an over-all guide or plan, rather than just making decisions as I go.
Larry,
Thank you for sharing. Yes we do have a guide. I encourage you to look into our book, TIGERS Among Us – Winning Business Team Cultures and Why They Thrive. I show how a leader with 10 employees has built a team that is so effective, the company earned close to $10 million during the current recession. There are simple and common sense examples that make sense for a small business owner.
With regard to your new employees, on boarding and sharing your culture and cultural expectations is absolutely necessary. Another example in the book provided by Jason Levin shows how he does this.
In my view, understanding the type of culture you want to create and what values your employees need to display daily in how they treat one another will save the small business owner time and resources in stemming conflict and in creating culture conflict. All too often organizations hire according to the resume rather than the resume and values compliment. This will cause the culture of a small business to waffle as strong personalities pull organizational behavior into multiple directions.
So the book is a good reference, and we have also created this to compliment the book. It is the TIGERS Team Wheel game http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaoNAlxUIPY and we have businesses using it for employee candidate selection as a pre-hiring exercise.
Dianne