FOUR TIPS TO HAVE THE RIGHT TEAM IN PLACE: TIP 1
Updated: Jul 12, 2018
In the long list of analogies that I have heard, this is by far one of my favorites, “There is a butt for every seat…”
This can be applied to virtually any scenario. For example, in a sales discussion, it refers to the need to continue searching for prospects that fit your product or offering. What I’d like to focus on today, is how this analogy relates to personnel, and having the right people in the right positions on your team.
Every single person has strengths. I firmly believe that. Many are not being utilized properly and some are not sure what their strength is, but they have it. Our job as managers, owners, executives, and leaders is to find those strength areas and allow our team members to utilize them. Allow them to do what they do best and shore up the rest.Find the right “butt for the right seat”, put them in it, and watch them take off. There are four tips to doing this, and this week, we’ll focus on the first one.
TIP 1: IDENTIFY STRENGTHS IN YOUR TEAM
Helping someone understand his or her strengths is paramount to working through this process. If people aren’t true to themselves about who they are and what they are really good at, it will be a fight to get them to focus their energy. It has become “politically incorrect” to tell someone that they are better at one thing than another. Similarly, I believe in the phrase “you can be anything you want to be” but the problem is that it leaves out an important detail: at what cost?
Most of the time, people excel at what comes naturally to them. They may need some additional coaching on realizing or recognizing that, but it’s often better to uncover that early in someone vs. struggling down a path that is not as natural. It’s both exhausting for the person and can certainly drag a team down and impact overall performance.
A HELPFUL TOOL: PERSONALITY PROFILES
As a business owner, CEO, leader, manager etc., it’s important for us to do the same thing. If we are truly honest with ourselves, we are better at certain components of our business than others. Being honest about that helps the people on your team be honest about that. A helpful tool is to use personality profiles for your team. The ones that are the most valuable, can give you insights into yourself and your team’s tendencies. They don’t explain what we can and can’t do, but they do give us a window into what we enjoy doing and are more naturally inclined to do. Using these personality profiles as a powerful tool to first understand yourself, and then your team, will increase your team’s ability to work together, and set you up to put the right people in the right seat, making for a happier and much more productive team. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
