Tag Archives: Teams

Do It The Way Rome Did – Overwhelm The Competition

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Whether you are a home office worker, an entrepreneur, or a corporate CEO, your job as the leader of your business is to succeed. Success does not come from good ideas of even brilliant performance unless it is totally integrated with the mission or your company, which, in one way or another, must come down to the bottom line of making money.

Recognizing that inescapable fact, a leader’s job is both less complex, but more difficult than one might imagine.

At a tech conference I attended, Glyn Meek, President and CEO of Triactive, now President and CEO of Software On Sailboats explained his theory that the job of CEO, has only 2 components:

  • Never stop raising money.
  • Create a buzz about the company.

Someone Else Can Do Everything Else

True, although this is particularly applicable to high tech start ups where “two young geeks in a garage” create the original technology and, at some point, someone has to bring in venture capital and they definitely will want an adult, that is someone with major big company experience,to run the company.

From this skeletal beginning three other jobs of a boss/leader become clear.

Building An A Team

The CEO or leader must be a team builder. Having a marketing whiz or a tech guru or even a bona fide genius on hand is simply not enough in today’s increasingly complex, rapidly changing, intensely competitive business environment. To both keep pace and solve complex problems quickly you need a team and not just any team. Having an A team is absolutely mandatory. A CEO must be secure enough to hire A players, people who are as smart and talented and driven as he or she is, and more accomplished in their particular area of expertise.

A Players vs B Players

If you don’t hire A players but rather B players, you will not only not achieve the results you want, but your company’s performance will tend to deteriorate, or, at the least, require a lot more energy to sustain as time goes on. B players trigger certain dynamics, since they aren’t likely to hire A players and may not be secure enough to hire even B players. Your company’s performance may decrease as employees begin to consist of more and more C players. This is what Glyn Meek called the Meek Theory of Company Deterioration.

Install Systems to Insure Communication and Synchronization

Once you have your A team on board, then you must constantly communicate with them and put in place systems within your organization which allow your team to stay in constant contact with each other.

Ram Charan, advisor to CEOs of Fortune companies like GE, Ford, DuPont, EDS, Universal Studios and Verizon, believes that continuous and focused exchange of information leads to synchronization in a company which leads to success.

“A synchronized organization is like a champion rowing team-people working together with a certain rhythm that allows the group to do things the individual could not do. Synchronization expands the capacity of the whole group” Ram Charan points out in What the CEO Wants You to Know.

The reason why many small businesses never expand is because they don’t know how to create mechanisms for constant communication between individual employees and managers.

Whether it’s through regular conference calls, emails or personal meetings, it is the job of the CEO to see that there is continuous communication and feedback throughout the organization.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road-Creating a Sales Organization

Giving your organization a sales orientation, rather than a development orientation will make or break your company. No matter how superior your product or effective your service, there are no positive financial results, which business is all about, until you get a customer, and consequently generate revenue. ( Meek developed a very unique and fresh approach to solving this as-old-as-selling problem. Clearly the Internet has changed the face of sales prospecting. More information is available now than ever before. Raw business information is available from open-sources like LinkedIn, Spoke or Jigsaw. So his company integrated a browser within Desktop Sales Explorer to help you gather business details into your prospecting database. And Desktop Sales Explorer directs the integrated browser to help you find email addresses, home pages, contact information and more. Pretty slick, no?)

As Meek put it, “Rome didn’t build a great empire by holding meetings. They did it by killing all who opposed them.”

Metaphorically speaking, the only way to douse your competitor’s flame is to overwhelm them with so many successful sales by your organization that they become increasingly unable to compete.

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Working In Teams Produces Better Results, Gives You An Exit Strategy

Building

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Why do you need a team? After all, you’re the brainiac who figured out this whole entrepreneur/ start up thing.   It was you and you alone who decided how to put together a product or service; took a flying leap out of a secure job with a regular paycheck, toiled through the night, took those long shot chances and finally coerced customers into actually paying you good money for what your work produced.  Why would you want a team?  Why not hog the spotlight, keep all the rewards and just keep doing it all yourself?
The Importance of Team Building

Very simple. It is impossible to overstate the importance of a team approach. First, both the complexity and the velocity of business today, which, for any business on the Internet, is, at once, technical, global and 24/7, carried out in a couple of dozen different time zones, have eclipsed one person’s ability to control it all. A founder, however talented,  must also be a leader and rely on his team. He must also seek answers, feedback, collaboration and leadership in others, to be infused into his own leadership. More starkly, any one person could be run over by a bus, heaven forbid. Or stuck in an elevator between floors in a power shortage when decisions must be made, emergency generators must be cranked up, juice must flow, somehow. Or a crisis could strike, and a genuine crisis usually outstrips one person’s ability to solve it because it must be viewed from many angles and may have many components. And speed counts.

Even at a time when there is no crisis, research has proven that teams produce better results than individuals, even geniuses. Teamwork maximizes individual strengths and compensates for weaknesses. Cohesive groups also outperfrom groups which lack cohesion with more talented members coaching the less talented, and all pulling together for the common good, rather than individual glory, a more successful approach to achieving group goals.

So, eventually, if you wish to keep growing and succeeding, you will definitely need a team.  Make it a good one.  When you go through the process of hiring people, you should remember you are putting together the intellectual capital which will form your company. This is the area that investors, bankers, analysts and the public will look at when attempting to decide how capable your company is, and how much money, or confidence they should invest in it.  Also…..trust me on this….they will walk you through that “What if you get hit by a bus?” scenario quite a lot.  And they have a point — not just for themselves as investors but for your spouse and children or anyone who depends on you.  If you’re a one man or one woman show and something happens to you, there’s no show.

The sense of foreboding and possible catastrophe, when a company founder is a solo act and hasn’t yet formed his in-house team, can be minimized considerably if you write copious notes on your procedures and who performs them in your absence.  It’s not absolutely necessary for example, that you have an in house technician for your blog if you have a business web host that offers 24/7 Platinum service and a “no more than 10 minutes down” guarantee and you also have your own outsourced team of WordPress experts, all of whom can be reached by direct line, email and a support ticket at a moment’s notice.  There would have to be notes like this in a file, covering every funtion of your organization, from who does your graphics, or where you order them on the web, to where your revenue comes from, how often, who writes the check or and how does it get to you, whether through direct deposit at your back, by check or PayPal.com and what day of the month.  You get the drift.  Your notes would be like a manual anyone could pick up and start running your business on Day One.  Even if not perfect, such a file is extremely reassuring, particularly to investors, and also to your spouse.

In the case of a blog, however, since you have your own distinctive voice, you will have to start cultivating an outsourced team of guest bloggers who share your viewpoint, or that will be the first and most important team member to add.  Even if the proverbial bus comes along and your site is still humming along, it won’t make much difference unless you have another “voice” who can take over.  And any potential future buyers will be acutely aware of this.

There’s more on this subject at Importance of Team Building which compares team building with ducks or geese flying, and being able to fly further in formation because it’s in their DNA.

“Build teamwork into the DNA of your organization…In a rapidly changing world filled with complex environmental issues, a border-less global economy, and ever increasing competition, the importance of team building takes on a dangerously sharp edge.

It’s simple, if you don’t realize the importance of team building and don’t build teams that get the job done, your organizational goose is cooked.”

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