A strong team with a great work ethic provides a solid foundation for business success.
If your team doesn’t work well, it can lead to missed deadlines, poor organisation and conflict. Getting the dynamic right is a challenging but important part of ensuring business success. Here we examine how you can plan well to advance your team and achieve your goals.
Facing the Challenge of Planning Ahead
Picture yourself in twelve months. What has your team achieved? How did you go about getting there?
It’s crucial to position yourself at a future point and think about where you will be, to plan your interim strategy to achieve those goals.
So, let’s forward plan the next 12 months within your business and the progress you expect, plus what turnover or growth you want to achieve. Once you know where you want to be, you can see how it can affect not only your career path but that of your finance team too.
Strategic planning will give you direct exposure to some challenges as well as helping the team (and the business as a whole) to flourish. It will enable your team to achieve new skills, develop their careers and play an active role in taking the company forward.
You will need to ensure you have the right team around you to facilitate performance across the company and enable you to lead the team effectively. You will be getting some direct exposure to challenges along the way and may need to consider insourcing or outsourcing your financial recruitment.
We’ll have more on planning in our next blog, but meanwhile, you can find out more about the role of the finance team in strategic planning here.
What Makes a Successful Team
Getting the basics right in any team structure will enable that team’s ability to grow and strengthen, providing not only efficiency but the catalyst for a successful business.
Communication. Good teams communicate with each other, sharing thoughts, ideas and opinions. They are willing to listen to different opinions and thrive in an environment of openness and acceptance of difference. Communication across your team is an absolute essential to enable efficiency and provide an inclusive workplace.
Trust. This is an essential part of any good team. An open environment where individuals can voice opinions or admit to weakness will help your team bond and create trust. A culture of support will help individuals flourish in their specialist roles.
Commitment and Ownership. Your team needs to focus on goals and be committed to achieving objectives. Providing them with clear direction and ensuring they know how they contribute to the business success will secure shared ownership, and count towards the prosperity of the company overall.
Good Leadership. A strong team leader is a pivotal part of any successful team. Good leadership involves giving encouragement, motivating, and leading by example, to gain trust and respect.
Encouraging Diversity. We’re not all the same. And it’s good to have a diverse workforce who can play to each other’s strengths and weaknesses. As well as a different skillset to ensure roles are filled, a range of ages, cultures and personalities can help add more ideas to the creative pipeline. More and more companies are using personality tests as part of the interview process to ensure a good team mix. You can read more about personality tests here.
It’s Not All About Work. Good teams have fun. That doesn’t mean you have to be shaking your stuff in the nightclub three nights a week with your team, but it does involve ensuring you have a team who get along and enjoy each other’s company. We all spend a lot of time at work, so some light moments in the working day aids the wellbeing of your team, helps avoid burnout, potential conflict and can even help alleviate sickness.
Strategies for Creating an Amazing Team
- Review Your Practice
Start by reviewing your business and recruitment, looking back over the last year. It’s good to take some time to reflect on what you have done. Ask yourself if there is anything you would do differently from the last time you recruited. What was successful about the process? How did those you hired fit into the team? Are the candidates still in place since the last recruitment drive?
- Invest to Progress
What skills do your current team possess? Do they have the right skills for financial reporting? Are they using their skills to maximum efficiency? Do you need to invest in upskilling, without creating a gap elsewhere in the team?
- Define the Roles
When do your team thrive, and when do they struggle? Would a shift in responsibility be effective? Maybe one team member excels at X, while another is much more efficient at Y. Could roles be amended?
- Check Your Resources
What resources/assets do you currently have? Do these enable you to achieve your goals, or do you need to consider an upgrade?
- Develop a People Strategy
Do you have a people strategy in place to support the commercial focus?
- Upgrade Your Process
If your business is diversifying, do you have different requirements now to support that new direction? Maybe its time to think about updating the process of your recruitment. Think about past recruitment drives. How much time did recruitment take out of senior staff’s working day, how long did it take to find suitable candidates, and were the tools used effective for your business needs? Could they be better?
You can read more about creating a successful team here.
What Next?
So, we know that successful teams are the product of a good leadership structure, communication, a sense of belonging and the knowledge that everyone is working towards the same goals.
If you would like to improve your business and build a great team to take it forward, it’s helpful to review your current structure and plan effectively. If you would like help building your team’s skillset, or recruiting new staff, contact us today.
Thanks,
Rachel
About Rebus Recruitment
Rebus Financial Recruitment provides a specialist and focused recruitment service to its customers, which historically range from a wide variety of organisations including SME’s to large PLCs.
We strive to offer both the client and candidate a seamless recruitment experience. Using our expertise, we get to the heart of employer and employee needs; and, in doing so, we match the two perfectly. To find out more, get in contact with one of our team today, or you can call us on 01282 930930.
