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Is your team achieving gold medal success? You can’t beat the competition if you don’t have a strong team working to achieve a common goal. And you can’t take first place in a competitive marketplace if you’re not effectively executing strategies and tactics on a daily basis that will make it feasible for your team and your company to reach the goals that you’ve set.
Set yourself up for maximum small business success tomorrow by building a powerful team today. Following are the key components of a powerful business team. Evaluate your team against these factors, and determine whether or not you really are well-positioned to win the gold.
1. Diversity
A diverse team is a strong team. Studies show again and again that diverse teams which include not just members from different genders and ethnic backgrounds but also members with different experiences, skills and ways of thinking are the foundation of a powerful team that consistently over-performs. A team filled with “yes” people or a team filled with analytical thinkers and no visionary thinkers will be limited in potential.
2. Talent
Recruiting the best talent is imperative to developing a powerful team that drives small business success. This means you might need to be open to new avenues of finding and recruiting the best talent, and you might have to be creative in the compensation that your company offers to lure the best talent to your team. Perks like telecommuting and flexible hours might be all it takes to make your company look incredibly attractive to talented professionals.
3. Business Needs
To develop a strong team, you need to understand what your business needs, not what you need. You might like the idea of hiring someone to take an unpleasant task off of your plate, but is that what the business needs to grow in the future? A powerful team typically includes a leader who puts her self-interests aside and focuses 100% on what’s in the best interest of the company.
4. Retention
Attracting the best talent is only half the battle. You also need to retain your best employees. Develop a company culture where your employees are given the opportunity to thrive and achieve maximum job satisfaction, so they never want to leave. Fostering a positive work environment will enable you to keep your most talented employees who have significant impacts on your team and business success.
5. Flexibility
A powerful team is a nimble team that can quickly and effectively shift priorities and make the necessary decisions to proactively respond to the micro- and macro-environments. Strip down the approval process, keep meetings short and laser-focused, and remove anything that doesn’t add value to the company, the team, and the customer. A lean organization supported by lean and powerful teams will be ready to seize any opportunity and thwart any threat, so the company can achieve maximum success.
I am blogging on behalf of Visa Business and received compensation for my time from Visa for sharing my views in this post, but the views expressed here are solely mine, not Visa’s. Visit http://facebook.com/visasmallbiz to take a look at the reinvented Facebook Page: Well Sourced by Visa Business. The Page serves as a space where small business owners can access educational resources, read success stories from other business owners, engage with peers, and find tips to help businesses run more efficiently. Every month, the Page will introduce a new theme that will focus on a topic important to a small business owner’s success. For additional tips and advice, and information about Visa’s small business solutions, follow @VisaSmallBiz and visit http://visa.com/business.
Susan Gunelius
Susan Gunelius is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Women on Business. She is a 30-year veteran of the marketing field and has authored a dozen books about marketing, branding, and social media, including the highly popular Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing, 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing for Dummies, Blogging All-in-One for Dummies and Kick-ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps. Susan’s marketing-related content can be found on Entrepreneur.com, Forbes.com, MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, and more. Susan is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She has worked in corporate marketing roles and through client relationships with AT&T, HSBC, Citibank, Intuit, The New York Times, Cox Communications, and many more large and small companies around the world. Susan also speaks about marketing, branding and social media at events around the world and is frequently interviewed by television, online, radio, and print media organizations about these topics. She holds an MBA in Management and Strategy and a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing and is a Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC).
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A flexible team is usually a very efficient one of the team leader knows each team member very well. Also if they know each other so well that they know with are the weaknesses, strong points and interests of each person in the group. This way they can redirect the work to the most able person for the task.
Great article, loved reading it.