Sidd Pagidipati: Building All-Star Teams
Collaboration is the key to success. The best businesses group their employees with similar skill sets and responsibilities together and have them work as cohesive units. That’s how you get the most value out of your payroll. A team of employees is almost always more productive than the same number of employees working separately.
A little bit about myself: I’m Sidd Pagidipati, and I’ve founded several successful businesses. Through my experiences as an entrepreneur, I’ve learned how to build great teams, and I’d like to share this knowledge with you.
Do It Yourself
To build great teams, you must start with great individuals.
But where do you find these great individuals? How do you identify the top talent in your industry and convince them to work for your company?
There are plenty of recruitment firms out there that will tell you they can handle this task for you, but you shouldn’t listen to them. The candidates these firms present to their clients often end up being the leftovers, the good but not great, the people who just don’t have what it takes to secure a high-end job on their own. Top performers don’t need to use a recruitment firm to find a job. You’re going to have to go out and find them.
Pay Up
The law of supply and demand applies to many aspects of running a business — especially talent recruitment. No matter what industry your business belongs to, there’s only a small supply of top talent, and they’re always in high demand. That means they won’t come cheap.
Never pinch pennies when building your teams. According to the Harvard Business Review, the top performers in a field are about four times more productive than the average performer in that field. So, even if you must pay a top performer two or three times more than average to persuade them to work for you, you still get more value out of that arrangement than paying an average worker an average salary.
Reward Teams, Not Individuals
This is the age of analytics. Most companies use metrics, such as the amount of sales an employee makes over a certain period of time, to evaluate performance. Then, companies rank their employees based on these metrics, and the rankings determine who gets raises, promotions, and other rewards.
The problem with this set-up, though, is that it discourages collaboration. The pursuit for some rewards is a zero-sum game. If one employee gets a raise, then there might not be enough money to go around for other employees to get a raise as well. Your employees won’t help their co-workers if doing so has the potential to hurt them.
You should value team performance over individual performance. For example, instead of rewarding one employee’s good work with a big raise, you could use the same amount of money to reward a team’s good work by giving everyone in the team a small raise. That gives employees all the incentive they need to work together.
Once you establish a culture of collaboration, you’ll be amazed at what your organization is able to accomplish.