#spirituality #selfdevelopment #personalitytransformation
Building a Strong Management Team
You ask how to form a cool, massive, real, holistic, unstoppable management team that will develop your business with you, going through a big transformation journey.
If you want to grow significantly – you know you need to make a huge number of changes at once, there are many different shifts happening. When you change a lot, your business changes, there's a big responsibility on the management team – they need to change too.
What's interesting: the responsibility in this case lies not on you, but on this team, because they may simply not want to change – that's their own choice.
This is not something you can command, something you totally control. The fact is, even if you made some wrong moves during scaling and the team didn't go along with you – it doesn't mean it's your fault. The top management team chooses for itself: whether to move with you to x5, x10, x20, x100 and earn more money together, or open new markets, or get a large number of customers, or you part ways.
Aspects of Team Building
Let's take the most important aspect of building a cool management team.
I am deeply convinced that a strong team (I'm talking about a real team) is possible when there is a leader: when you as a business owner attract such people.
I recently had an interesting example. I started managing the company GeekBrains (we combined GeekBrains and Skillbox to do an IPO on NASDAQ in the USA). We were in the process, and the preliminary range was $1.8–2.5 billion. Jumping into a big goal, it's important to do it with an incredibly strong, cool team. I managed one part of the business, my partner – another, and you know you have to boost your part of the business very strongly. At one point, I had 30 strong directors, leaders, 20 top managers, and other good leaders with whom I spent a huge amount of time and wanted to spend that time.
Many ask: "How did you even manage 30 people? That's some strange and incomprehensible approach. Why so many people? Could it be an overload?"
But the fact is, when you spend daily time at work and move towards a large goal, if you are a person with great strength, capable of handling a huge number of tasks – you can easily handle communication with 30 directors. Now imagine: you don't just have 30 ordinary people – incredibly strong, cool top managers, big leaders. So first – good employees. Good leaders come to a strong leader.
The second thing in forming a team or individual people is your ability to openly, honestly, without expectations discuss, tell and inspire the potential leader: what kind of business you will have, what you want to achieve. And do it honestly.
Why do I say "without expectations"? If from the very beginning you hang some illusion on the person, give them carrots that don't exist, say they can earn some cosmic money, but they won't, or say there will be some growth, but that growth won't happen, lie too much, don't show the truth, at some point you will lose. At some point, this person will leave, and they can create an incredible number of problems.
For example, during interviews, I have hired more than a thousand people and hundreds of directors in my life. I always try to tell as much as possible about the negative things, the downsides, to show what bad things will happen in our activities, in the company. And then show what opportunities this person has, why it's cool to be with me, motivate them: show them the strong side of yourself, the company, incredibly interesting, long-term work ahead.
Honesty is incredibly needed: when it's there, the person starts to trust you, they open up and come to the company both because of you and because of the business. They have two solid reasons why they make the choice: it's great when you leave the person after the interview with the feeling that they definitely want to work with you, and you have the opportunity to make them an offer or not. This is probably a separate art, how to conduct an interview correctly, how to motivate a person.
When you open up to them and give out the necessary information to a certain extent (of course, you may not tell them some things, some partner confidential information, etc.), this person gradually gives you the maximum information. You need to make the person tell their truth, and their truth is not the very cool qualities they have, and not the very good things they have done. You need to look at their fears, pain, problems, their current feeling about work, about you, your company, about the things you do, what bothers them, what potential problems they have. It can be difficult to do in an hour interview, but overall it’s possible. Of course, the person will not open up to you 100% during the interview, they won’t tell you, for example, that they have problems with their spouse or that their spouse makes the decision about work for them, but basically, you will be able to form a certain picture. When you lead the person into a conversation without expectations, they give out a bit more information, you see if you are ready to interact with this person.
The Scale of Personality and Attracting Strong People: How Leadership Charisma Affects Team Building
For strong people to come to you, you must be a person of large-scale personality: this doesn't mean being famous, having a million followers; it means you are a person who thinks and looks incredibly globally and massively.
The person sitting in front of you at the interview feels this energy and strength and wants to be with it. They feel your spark, feel your strength and know that with you there will be scale – not only of your business, but also the transformation of their inner personality. The more you can show the person your inner state of scale, the more likely strong leaders will come to you.
Hiring People "Under" the Organizational Structure
Here is a mistake made by 9 out of 10 business owners: they hire people under the existing organizational structure.
There is some organizational structure that is considered correct for scale or growth, and they start hiring people for it. On one hand, having an organizational structure is correct. I devote a lot of energy and attention to this, always do this in all my companies. At the same time, you need to understand that the organizational structure is dynamic and can change. "Today, a person came to me for an interview, under whom a new department needs to be opened," "a new person came who should work in marketing but should not report to the marketing director," "today, a person came to me who should be engaged in sales but should not report to the sales director," "a person came to me who according to the organizational structure should report to some manager, but in fact, will report to you as the one who drives this business, monitors it, and is with it every day."
A dynamic organizational structure is very important primarily from the point of view of attracting new personnel. It is, of course, very important because in the process of scaling, you never know what will happen.
For example, you planned to grow 10 times on a certain type of marketing. You say your performance marketing will grow 10 times, so you need a certain number of people in marketing, sales, etc. In the process of growth, something changes, opens up, besides the online channel, for example, the offline channel, and your organizational structure changes in general to withstand the flow of customers from the offline channel. If you say: "No, we agreed to grow strictly in this organizational structure" – you do not allow new people, opportunities, paths and can lose this point of scale, growth, and the whole business. At some point, you just lose because we are used to evaluating people who won by some certain factors. But often they could have achieved 10 times more or we don't know the real reason why they succeeded. Who really made a big result? And you know this very well from your own experience. When you want to form a strong team of leaders – you must understand that these people will interact with each other, there will be quarrels and clashes. It is important to create an environment where these clashes are possible because they will happen anyway. Building illusions that there will be no internal quarrels, offenses, that no one will share territory with each other – is quite hard. But creating an environment where people can openly talk about it, discuss it with you as the owner – is important: so that the person comes and calmly tells you about some internal conflict. In my last two businesses (both in GeekBrains and in AGRO24), the same people worked in design and programming: some directors worked in both businesses. They quarreled in AGRO24 and continued in GeekBrains. Often, they sit in a meeting, everything goes smoothly, then separately a quarrel begins between them. At some point, I said: "Guys, I'm not interested in your internal conflict anymore, I don't want to deal with it." I told each person that I want to work with them personally, that they should pay attention to themselves when communicating with another person. Did their communication improve during work? Probably not. They learned to interact with each other, it is important that they stayed in my team until the end. This is a great example when you understand and see not the weaknesses in a person, but the strength they carry.
Creating an Environment for Open Communication
If you want to form a strong management team, whether alone or with your partner – you must understand that every person has negative sides, that every person carries some darkness, strange quality.
I learned over the years to focus on the good side of a person and direct energy to their positive side in the process of work.
An excellent example: I had people who have been with me not in 2, 3, or even 4 companies. I had people who worked with me at Megaplan when I was the CEO; when I owned Business Youth, managed AGRO24 for a long time, when we did business with Andrey Rogachev; at A2life, when we made an educational company, at GeekBrains. People experienced all the businesses with me, and in the 3rd, 4th business, at some point, you just feel great being with this person.
To learn to accept other people for so long with various changes, you must learn to accept yourself: love yourself, respect, learn to live in balance with yourself, learn to admit that the person interacting with you changes. They can change both for the better and for the worse, they can fall.
There’s a hypothesis, an opinion among employees: if I’ve been with the company for a long time, then I should definitely get a promotion – whether it’s a higher salary, a new title, a different role, or recognition. But I always say that a person, over time, of course, develops: their whole life is about growth. But growth can be positive, or it can lead to degradation. A person can grow a lot for several years and then start to degrade significantly. If you’re the kind of person who can feel this, look at it openly, honestly, without illusions, and can discuss it with people, showing them their truth – you will build a strong team.
A strong team forms when you can look at each person individually, see the person in them first and foremost, and give them the next step, show them what’s next for them – not be afraid to do it.
Building a Team: Individual Approach and the Importance of Honesty in Management
Sometimes, you need to tell a strong director: “Listen, we can’t move forward together anymore. You’re stronger than me” or “we need to go separate ways because I see you have different goals, and right now, you don’t fit into my business strategy.” And that will be honest. At the same time, you can make a strong move: you see the person has changed, and you build part of the processes and the company around them. This also shows your strength as a large-scale person.
If you look at any large-scale organization in the world – there will always be a mix of approaches: somewhere very systematic, rigid, likely complex approaches, where a person can’t move, everything is very detailed, they work 20 hours a day as a leader, as a top manager, as a director, and in the same company, there will be people, processes, directions, activities, where the leader and director are in full freedom. Taking any big company and tying some rules to it, saying it’s only a culture of freedom here – is somewhat deceitful. Because if you go into some areas, for example, where there are safety and customer service stability issues, or safety regarding a person’s life inside, you will see a mechanism of the army: military, strict, strong, incredibly detailed processes.
You need to focus on the fact that hiring a large, serious, cool top management team and forming such a team, a real team – it’s about your scale of personality in terms of the people around you throughout your life.
How many different people do you have in your life, what’s your wife or husband like, what’s your relationship with your parents, with close people, what close friends and acquaintances do you have? Do you have acquaintances you just walk with? Friends you watch movies with? Friends you discuss business projects with? Acquaintances you travel with? Can you easily and comfortably chat with neighbors? How wide is your range of relationships with people? How easily do you engage with different layers?
For example, with some incredibly wealthy, inaccessible people and at the same time with very simple ones – and you treat everyone the same in terms of honesty towards the other person.
First and foremost, you know: regardless of what a person carries socially, they carry the human. And you should treat them with an honest state, with an inner state of love, joy, and honesty, freedom, acceptance, mutual respect. The larger your social circle, the easier it is for you to form any team – top managers who manage your business, strategy, development, product, sales, finance, marketing; or it’s a team of a small department that develops a new channel or international development; or it’s a small group of your acquaintances with whom you walk together, or read books, or watch movies, or travel.
The most important thing to have a cool management team is to be a cool, genuine, honest, sincere, value-driven person. And these are things like self-love and harmony with yourself, living by the laws of the Universe, treating other people with incredible honesty, respect, compassion, and helpfulness.