6 Questions to Help Envision Your Future Team

It goes without saying that the support of a highly-skilled team is essential to achieving the future firm you’ve always envisioned. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that most team leaders focus almost exclusively on a prospect’s skill set when making hiring decisions. Unfortunately, that can quickly become a recipe for team discord and a problematic lack of cooperation.

In order to create a practice where you and other members of your team genuinely enjoy the work and collaborate at the highest level, you need to be surrounded not only by strong skills but also compatible mindsets and personalities. After all, it’s merely human nature to gravitate to people who share our values and work ethic. Crafting an environment and culture that brings out the best of your team and deepens each member’s personal fulfillment therefore necessitates a close alignment of work styles, similar client service philosophies and shared purpose and intent.

If you already have an established team, think about the personality traits of those successful team members who you most enjoy working with. Similarly, try to identify the characteristics of those team members whom you find difficult to collaborate with. Look to replicate the positive qualities and avoid the negative ones as you assess future hires.

Ask yourself these questions before hiring a new team member:

1. Ideally, what’s the culture and environment you want your team to have?

2. What’s your vision for how your team should serve its clients, each other, and you?

3. What year-to-year success measures do you want your team to achieve?

4. Aside from the obvious (e.g., honesty, integrity) what other values do you want your team members to have to create the ideal environment and culture?

5. What personality traits (e.g., humor, relaxed, diligent) do you want team members to exemplify?

6. Of the values and personality traits you’ve listed, which ones are most essential to produce the success measures you want to achieve?

In addition to technical skills, these qualities should serve as a road map for how to hire remarkable players for your team – individuals who will be able to easily integrate and work with you and others on the team, as well as achieve the results and success you want. Remember that it’s far easier to create a powerful future if you intentionally surround yourself with people who match the environment and culture you wish to create. For an additional process to help guide you in the hiring process, the DISC assessment is a personality profile test that provides insight into one’s natural and adaptable behaviors styles and preferences. Understanding DISC patterns, you have better insights into individuals and teams in the areas of workplace, leadership, management, sales, hiring and employee development.

Coaching Questions from this article:

1. What common characteristics are shared by those people you’ve most enjoyed working with over the course of your professional career?

2. What common characteristics are shared by those people you’ve least enjoyed working with over the course of your professional career?

3. What steps can you integrate into both your hiring practices as well as team building work to identify and cultivate those qualities?