Though there is certainly no shortage of “Help Wanted” signs across the U.S. right now, many businesses are struggling to welcome new people aboard. The past two years have been challenging for employees and business leaders alike, and there’s no telling what the future will hold. Those in charge of team management may find themselves in a bind these days – even if they’re overseeing a solid team, it might lack in size. Though a smaller group can actually make team management easier, it can also limit productivity and growth. With that in mind, what can management teams do to prepare for the future when it’s been difficult to hire new team members? Let’s discuss.
How to Prepare for the Difficulty of Hiring New Team Members
Re-Establish Your Mission and Goals
As the world slowly returns to normalcy, there’s perhaps never been a better time to take a step back and re-evaluate your business’s and team’s priorities. Balancing multiple projects while short-staffed is never easy, but some projects are bound to be more essential than others. Consider whether and how your organization’s mission and goals may have changed since last year (and the year before that, etc.) – you might find that certain roles no longer need to be filled or that other roles can evolve, combine, and so on. Indeed, managing a smaller team might help you prioritize and focus on the most pressing matters that will propel your business forward. And when it becomes easier to recruit new team members once more, you’ll have a stronger grasp on the types of people you need and what to expect from them.
Focus on Developing Current Employees
Plenty of value can be derived from hiring new people. That said, you don’t want to bring new people on board simply for the sake of it. After all, recruitment is costly, and retention is vital. In many cases, the person you need to fill a new, important role is right in front of you – at least, they have the potential to grow into said role. As such, it’s equally as important to engage in leadership development as it is to seek out new team members externally. Employees with leadership potential will want to find avenues for growth, and it’s essential to provide them with these opportunities to keep them around. Of course, promoting an employee internally can leave a lower-level position unoccupied, so it’s crucial to prepare for these outcomes in advance (i.e., succession planning). Still, adding a member to your leadership team is a key way to strengthen your organization from the inside. In fact, doing so may help you hire new team members in the future.
Rethink Your Hiring Process
Some things are simply out of our control, such as the current pandemic and its economic fallout. That said, you can still control how you approach recruitment for your business. Sure, your hiring team can’t magically change the way things have been for the past two years, but they can find new, creative ways to find the best people available and encourage them to apply. You might open your doors to a wider pool of candidates, improve and expand your employer outreach campaigns, create and advertise more remote work positions, establish new incentives for applicants, and so on. Not every initiative will succeed, but taking the time to reconfigure your hiring processes can benefit your business in the long run.
At Leadership Resources, our purpose is to make the impossible possible through people. We aim to do so by helping individuals develop patterns of success that will decrease obstacles and maximize productivity. Contact us here to learn more about what we do and how it can help your business succeed and grow at times like these when you need it most.
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Organizations are made up of individuals with unique perspectives, ideas, and life goals. But while each person inside a company sees things their own way, it’s important for an organization to establish a coherent vision that all leaders and team members can get behind and work toward. Achieving and maintaining this unity requires proper planning, ongoing execution, and flexibility. Here’s how to create an action plan to ensure all leaders share the same company vision.
How to Enstill Company Vision
Spell Out the Business’ Broader Mission
A company’s mission statement defines its overall purpose. In this way, a mission can be thought of as the foundation and motivation for your business efforts moving forward. The first step to ensuring that your leadership team unites around a collective vision is by creating and disseminating a clear and concise mission statement. Failing to do so is like trying to build a home on top of empty space — there’s nowhere to stand and everything falls apart.
Prioritize Short- and Long-Term Goals
Once your mission is firmly in place and well understood by all leaders in your company, the next step is to collectively come up with short-term and long-term goals. Some of these goals might be highly specific, such as meeting certain quotas by next quarter, and others might be more nebulous and far away, like “becoming the nation’s leader in a given industry.” One example of a great long-term goal is to implement consistent training with the help of a qualified EOS® Implementer. It’s important to categorize and prioritize these various goals so leaders and team members have a concrete sense of what to do in the coming days, weeks, months, etc., and why.
Delineate Different Types of Decisions
Uniting around a vision doesn’t happen overnight. Anyone who knows how to manage a team can attest that few decisions are immediately agreed upon by all parties. In a perfect world, all decisions would be unanimous, but in reality, attempting to find consensus for every choice can result in deadlock, frustration, and confusion. This is why it’s important for leaders to understand the differences between three main types of decisions: command, consult, and consensus.
Command decisions are executive orders that do not require team input. Consult decisions, while also adjudicated by the leader, do take team input into consideration. And consensus decisions are made collectively, sometimes with various compromises or concessions. There is a time and place for decisions of each nature. While command and consult decisions might not please everyone within your organization, they should still derive from and work toward the collective vision on which all leaders have agreed. A well-trained leader can determine when to implement which type of decision and why, as well as offer guidance to those who are struggling to figure out where each person’s role may take the company and decision-making process.
Keep Tabs on Individual and Team Performance
In order to ensure that your leaders are actively working towards a unified vision, you must take regular account of their performance as individuals and as a team. Traction®, one of the Six Key Components™ of the EOS Model™, is all about accountability and execution, turning the company vision into something tangible. If goals or expectations aren’t being met, there may be a disconnect that requires amending. Perhaps some leaders aren’t completely clear about what they should be doing or why. It’s difficult to achieve goals if said goals are not entirely understood, after all. This is why EOS® Visions are always measurable, written-down, and disseminated to all employees. By keeping tabs on leadership performance, you can stay alert to instances of miscommunication and realign focus.
Leave Enough Space to Adapt and Evolve
While a company vision should be clear as day, it shouldn’t be set in stone. Sometimes, priorities and goals shift due to internal and external circumstances. If and when there is a change in your organization’s outlook, leaders must jointly reconfigure their mindset and methods toward these new aims. These adjustments can vary in size and scope, but they’re important to make if your business is to continue thriving in an ever-changing environment. If leaders cannot shift focus as a unit, it will become difficult to move forward at all, which is why building a strong team culture is crucial for the outset — this requires going over Issues (another Key Component in EOS) on a regular basis in order to solve organizational problems to make room from change and growth.
Seeing Things Clearly and in Concert
Without free-thinking, diverse individuals, a business would lack dynamism and quickly run out of steam. Conversely, organizations that cannot come together around a shared vision tend to rip themselves apart. The key to ongoing success, then, is taking advantage of every leader’s unique qualities in order to come up with and execute upon a vision that serves the enterprise as a whole — this doesn’t mean everyone has to agree on everything all the time, but rather that everyone has a clear, connected sense of (and stake in) where the company is headed, and why. Adhering to the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)® helps every type of business achieve these results. At Leadership Resources, our purpose is making the impossible possible through people. We aim to do so by helping individuals develop patterns of success that will decrease stress levels and maximize productivity. Contact us here to learn more about what we do and how it can help your business succeed and grow at times like these when you need it most.
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