Building Your Dream Team

To ensure business success, build a team who share your values and goals

The people you surround yourself with make a big impact on your success. This is especially true when running a business, as relationships can make or break you.

What you want is a dream team that can work together harmoniously, while members challenge each other and contributes to the growth of the overall business.

Here are some tips on how to create a productive team that aligns with your vision.

Know yourself

Before you can begin to pick and choose the people you want surrounding you and helping you with your business, you must know yourself. Write down your most important values and priorities, both for your business and for you, personally.

You won’t be able to create your dream team until you understand exactly who you are and what you’re looking for in other people. Once you can define and delineate your values and goals, you can then start looking for like-minded people to bring on board.

Be selective

Of course, you want to work with great people. But some people have trouble deciphering which relationships are going to be beneficial and which will be detrimental.

Charisma does not always reflect how trustworthy a person is. When you’re combining talents and forming your dream team, ask people to provide references and show you real projects that they’ve completed successfully. If they have no track record, or they can’t prove to you that they follow through, those are both red flags.

You can also create a problem-solving scenario as a test or do a trial project together that will show how well you collaborate. It may become apparent right away that it’s not the right fit, and you’ll have dodged a bullet.

No matter how much you click with someone at first, no matter how much you like their personality, do all the research you can to ensure that they are who they say they are. Make sure you hire trustworthy, hard-working individuals that won’t leave you high and dry or bring the whole team down.

Who’s in your room?

To emphasize the importance of who you associate and collaborate with, ask yourself: who do I want in my room? As an entrepreneur and Mutual Capital Alliance, Inc. CEO Rick Sapio says, imagine that your life is a room, and there’s only one door. Whoever gets through the door is with you, in your room, forever.

Are there people in your room who don’t belong? Are you asking yourself why someone is there? It’s time to employ the Doorman Principle, Sapio says. We need to have a “bouncer” at our door to keep people out who don’t align with our values. He says that every single problem we have starts when we let in the wrong people.

This is a nice way to visualize who shares your values, philosophies, goals, and dreams. Who can you truly share things with? And who will challenge you to improve and grow? It’s a delicate balance. But once you know the type of person you want to be around, you can start being more selective and create a team that functions harmoniously on every level.

Don’t be afraid to say no. Guard your room like your life depends on it.

Don’t forget to check in with each other

Once you’ve established your dream team, continue to check in with each other. This is crucial to any team’s success and ultimately a business’s success.

Collaboration means you’re combining your knowledge and talent with that of others. And part of being successful in a collaborative environment is by having everyone on the same page. Good teams celebrate the successes of their members and the overall group while working through problems and tough times as one unit.

Have regular meetings or quick check-ins so that everyone on your team can voice their opinions and discuss challenges.

Building your dream team is one of the key steps to business success. Make sure you know your philosophy and find like-minded individuals who you can count on to come through in any situation, good or bad. Carefully select who you want in your room.

And don’t forget to nurture team relationships by having regular check-ins and vent sessions.

Paper Napkin Wisdom is here to help your business succeed. Our podcasts and blog posts are great resources for the modern entrepreneur, and our business success tools can transform your business plan into one that works. To learn more, get in touch with us today.