The Importance of Creating an A-Team

Any good leader or manager will tell you that the key to success is all about the quality, skills and experience of the people they surround themselves with.

And all great entrepreneurs understand that the skills needed to launch and grow a successful business are very different to the ones needed to manage and run an established operation.

From this perspective, my inspiration is (fellow Influencer) Richard Branson, who personifies having the right team around him. He has some of the best people and it’s fair to say the impact is obvious. He has one of the most recognised businesses in the world and I put this down to having an A-Team.

It’s not just naive, but also foolish to think that just one individual is capable of running a large organization on their own.

Anyone who does not have a decent team or management structure in place will sooner or later see aspects of the business start to suffer.

It is a fact of life that individuals are not talented at every discipline and sometimes it makes perfect sense to let the experts do the job they have been trained and are paid to do.

But running a team is not just about letting people get on with their designated roles. It’s also about creating the right mix of individuals and fostering the right spirit.

Every great team is at its most effective when its members are pulling in the same direction and they are all working towards the same targets. In other words it is all about creating a spirit of the collective.

And the process of creating the right spirit begins at the recruitment stage. That means that sometimes it is not the most outstanding candidate who always lands the job; it is often the person who is going to work best alongside and compliment the existing members of your team.

Every unit is made up of a collection of individuals with a wide variety of skills, experience and their own character traits. Not everyone is going to be a leader or have a dominant personality but that does not mean they should be valued less and will probably have their own unique set of skills and talents that they can bring to the table.

The real skill of recruitment is all about getting that blend of disparate talents and qualities which mix together to make a functioning unit.

If you get your recruitment process wrong, things will quickly start to go astray much like a dysfunctional family,

And at the end of the day results will always tell you whether you've managed to create a well-functioning team. A unit that is no longer functioning properly will be nowhere near as profitable or productive as one that is operating as a single unified unit towards the same purpose and targets.

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