When you’re deep in the details of planning your business growth strategy, there’s one aspect of your business you cannot forget: the people who will be putting these plans into action. There’s no recipe for a high-performing team, but there are some principles to follow and some questions to consider.

Why Build a Team?

Why do we talk about our employees in terms of “teams,” anyway? “Team” here isn’t just a euphemism for “staff.” Maybe you need a staff of workers: people who can individually complete a set of given tasks. Most organizations, however, only reach their potential through teamwork, with groups of people fulfilling certain roles and working together to achieve a goal. Even if your business primarily consists of solitary work, there will be situations that call for collaboration, deliberation, and the relaying of work from one person to the next. In those cases, it’s important for everyone to know their role and how their role interacts with other roles. Solitary work becomes less isolating when each individual can see where their work fits into the bigger picture and how different departments work together to create a final product.

Get it in Writing

Documentation is the sheet music for the orchestra that is your team. As you are laying out your vision for your business, think about why you’re doing what you’re doing. These are your principles and values. From there, you can envision concrete practices that will result in these values being carried out.

Process documentation is the foundation on which strong teams are built. As we talked about in this article, process mapping helps root out inefficiencies, standardize onboarding, and provide a framework for collaboration.

Other types of documentation, like the skill matrix, allow you to further strengthen your team by finding skill gaps and suggesting paths for further training and education. You want to know who you can turn to in any given situation and which people should work together on a particular project.

The Right Processes Build the Right Culture

While the word “culture” implies a group of people with shared beliefs and customs, it doesn’t mean everybody is the same. It suggests a framework in which everybody’s individual talents have the support and shared knowledge to add up to something exciting and invigorating.

A team of people with diverse skillsets can teach each other, building up the competence and flexibility of the organization as a whole while empowering each team member by giving them a chance to lead. It also builds trust between team members, as “knowledge hiding” is a major source of distrust within organizations. This occurs when one team member understands some procedure or has some skill that they refuse to share with others, believing that their position will become insecure if they share it.

Build Trust in Processes and People

Building a culture of trust in which everyone is empowered to learn, teach, and lead instills a growth mindset in your team. A growth mindset, as opposed to a fixed mindset, means understanding the difference between doing something and being something: just because you made a mistake doesn’t mean you are a mistake. It just means you now have an opportunity to grow, and we’re all continuously growing. None of us are the finished article. This perspective also eliminates the urge to hide a mistake or shift blame. Mistakes are part of life; the key is to learn from them.

In a high-performing team, there is not just trust between workers and managers. There is also a strong sense of trust between the team members themselves. If they are going to be collaborating on tasks together, they have to be able to build trust in each other and that each member will handle their part of the task. They must be able to trust in each member’s expertise and trust that all team members are pulling in the same direction.

Clear processes and a culture of learning produce secure employees. Secure people are not only more likely to trust one another; they are more likely to feel comfortable sharing the spotlight with others. Taking credit for another’s work is the flip side of hiding one’s mistakes. When everyone is confident in their abilities, everyone is more comfortable giving credit where credit’s due. Having one’s achievements recognized creates a stronger sense of community.

Organization Supports Teamwork

Smaller businesses might not need a hierarchical organizational system, with groups of employees working under managers, who report to a higher level of managers, who report to the executive level. Instead, smaller businesses can thrive with a more flexible structure that assigns managers to projects based on their individual skillsets.

What About Hiring?

Before you can get your employees making beautiful music together like a well-tuned orchestra, you’ve got to hire the right employees to begin with. Competency-based interviewing is our tried-and-true method for going beyond the resume and getting into the details that matter, which you can read more about here.

Another effective interview approach is situational judgment theory, which, as we covered in this article, involves “ presenting candidates with hypothetical scenarios to evaluate their responses and test their judgment and decision-making skills.” Taking your questions out of hypotheticals and placing them in real-world scenarios forces the interview to understand the role they are hiring for more deeply while allowing the interviewer to more accurately assess a candidate’s decision-making ability.

Nurture and Reinforce

With some careful planning and strategic thinking, you can experience the joy that comes with a talented team working in harmony. It all starts with clear values and documentation. With that in place, continuous reinforcement and space for self-reflection and collaboration will have your team making beautiful music together.