Results start with a team

I’m guessing this won’t come as a surprise: Your staff is key to the success of your business. Without the right people in place throughout your organization, no marketing initiative will achieve its desired return on investment.

According to a study performed by Will Felps, Terence R. Mitchell and Eliza Byington, even one bad apple can reduce the performance of a business team by 30 to 40 percent. New business efforts will fail if the customer service infrastructure is subpar, the sales force is not a well-oiled machine or the leadership team believes that “customer-centric” is just a buzzword not worth rigorously pursuing.

Jim Collins, noted author of New York Times best-sellers “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t” and “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies,” popularized the idea that leaders need to make sure that they have the right leadership team in place before they can move their companies in the right direction. His Twelve Questions Tool, a guide for leaders who want to build great, enduring companies, addresses the topic head-on: “Do we have the right people on the bus, and are 95 percent of our key seats filled with the right people?”

Asking this question is certainly a good place to start, but what can you do if the answer shows that your company has a problem? Although addressing such a problem is never easy, here are a few suggestions.

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n Build the right teams by focusing on the intangibles. Think about hiring your staff in the same way that a coach thinks about assembling a team. You need the right team members, rather than just the most qualified people.

n Develop a rigorous recruiting process. Organizations that have rigorous recruiting processes and track all of their communications with applicants are 40 percent more likely to be best in class. Candidates should undergo rigorous scrutiny, with interviewers trained to compare them on a consistent scale.

n Constantly assess and strengthen your team. Consistent, constructive performance reviews will keep your team strong. Consider the example of Jack Welch, who developed a performance-appraisal system that he called differentiation. Welch proposed biannual evaluations of all employees based on how their results advanced the company’s goals and how well they adhered to the company’s values. This evaluation ensures that employees know where they stand and where they must make progress. The evaluation includes telling employees whether they fall in the top 20 percent, middle 70 percent or bottom 10 percent and providing them with actionable feedback and coaching in order to help them to improve.

Although your company’s performance criteria for its employees may not align exactly with Welch’s, a consistent approach is a requirement of any performance-evaluation system. Such transparency will improve team performance across the board. It also will guarantee that employees at risk of termination are given a fair chance to improve their contribution to the team. •

Chris Ciunci is founder and managing partner of TribalVision, which has offices in Warwick, Boston and New York.

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