I attended the “Building a Dream Team” a talk given by Neil Davidson, Co-Founder, and joint CEO, Red Gate Software, Steve Barlow, Co-Founder, Alphamosaic, Alex Mehta, Communications Director, Judicium. This was part of the Cambridge Center for Entrepreneurial Learning (Cfel) “Enterprise Tuesday” talk series. The talks gave some insights into what you should do to build/hire that dream team – I though some of this advice was a little wayward but some very good (first the slightly off-key):
- A Business’s DNA is very much related to the economic conditions into which it was born – not sure if this is a very indirect way of saying it is harder/more expensive to recruit good people when the economy is doing well…
- Key things to look out for in motivating a dream team is focus on passion – the motivational speech given by Al Pacino’s character in the film “Any Given Sunday” was shown as an example. I’m sure passion goes a long way but it probably flames out long before talent. Although there was a suggestion that if you live and work with passion then customers will flock to you… not sure that is sage advice but there you go…
- Probably also slightly questionable was you either fight and win as a team or die as individuals. This seemed a little naive as it does not accept that individuals have their own goals, motives and success criteria that may be aligned with the firm’s desirable outcome.
The more valuable points:
- Really good people make the difference, the gap between the productivity of an excellent person and a normal (in terms of ability) person can be 1000%.
- Building teams does not stop at recruiting. It includes motivating, developing, retaining and releasing people at various stages.
- The culture of the firm dictates the effectiveness of day to day running of a firm and its ability to recruit the best candidates.
- What is a good environment for a dream team? Be open, involve people in decisions, care for your people and think about basic hygiene factors (e.g. do they have sufficient pay, free soda/coffee etc).
- Rivalry is good in a firm if it is constructive e.g. there is an intellectual rivalry to make a breakthrough rather than destructive e.g. the pay/promotion system forces you to stand on your colleagues to get ahead.
- No a*hole rule – do not hire people who anyone on the team thinks is an a*hole – they will be disruptive to the culture.
- Where to find good people – referrals, LinkedIn etc.
- Use psychometric testing to determine what people are really like – don’t rely solely on the basis of the interview – if the test says they are an axe murderer then they probably are an axe murderer no matter how charming they are in the interview.
They missed a few good points:
- Create a common goal – an external “enemy” is a good one to force the team to focus and all pull in the same direction.
- The make-up of the dream team may have to change as the company evolves/grows. Often entrepreneurs lose interest/motivation once the company gets bigger / bureaucratic. Also if you have an aging team then you want to think about refreshing the DNA whilst respecting the differing work-life balance requirements of people with families and those who have no dependents.
- There was a suggestion that you should hire family members and friends – on the basis you know what they are like and can trust them. I might suggest that this motive be tempered by the obvious difficult scenarios that ensue if things start to go wrong and you (or your board) need to be tough with these friends/family.
- Probably fairly obvious but they did not mention you need a breadth of skills in the dream team. There is little point in having all engineers if you are trying to take a product to market, some marketing, sales, and finance people will help. There is some credence in the approach of hiring in some of these people on a contingent basis.
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