In a 2019 study of employees, one-third of respondents said the thing they disliked the most about their job was upper management and senior leadership. The findings confirmed what many already knew — as the common saying goes: people don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses.

Poor leadership costs companies revenue, time, staff, and customers. And the leaders at the very top aren’t the only ones that have an impact. Every supervisory role has the capacity to exceed goals and inspire stellar performances or to miss the mark and impede productivity.

Building a leadership team that can help you achieve your goals requires careful and purposeful planning. I’ve had the opportunity to learn from my own successes and failures as a CEO as well as from my clients’ experiences.

These steps will help you create a leadership team that will grow with your organization in the future:

Embrace delegation
Establish accountability
Set goals and measurements
Recruit the right people.

Leaders must embrace delegation

The first step to building an effective leadership team may require a mindset shift rather than any particular actions. Leaders are often quite comfortable doing — taking on and completing tasks themselves. What they’re frequently not accustomed to: delegating.

This discomfort is unfortunate because delegation is what ultimately creates scale in a business. Any leader will reach their physical or mental capacity at some point, and if they haven’t learned to hand over tasks and responsibilities, that holding back will impede their ability to scale. A leader that can’t delegate — no matter what teams they build — is going to wind up with a business that can’t grow.

One tip I learned from one of my clients is to create a “don’t do” list. What are the tasks that must get done but are not an effective use of your expertise and skill set? That could be your starting point for delegating.

Accountability is critical for leadership

Effective delegation requires clarity about roles, responsibilities, and accountability.

One of the best places to start is with an accountability chart. Identify precisely who is responsible for what — not only for tasks but also for decisions and communication. You may be able to embark on this task before you’ve even compiled a team. If so, the process will provide you with useful information about the skills and attributes you’ll need in the individuals you hire.

From a clear accountability chart, you can detail the roles and responsibilities of each person on your team. These job descriptions will guide the hiring process and help develop metrics for success.

Clear goals and metrics drive success

Top-down goals with defined metrics provide necessary structure so teams and individuals know how to measure their success. Transparency in the creation, progression, and tracking of goals means that everyone knows what they’re accountable for and how the team is performing as a whole.

The company has goals, the executive has goals, and the team that reports to the executive has goals — all of which are aligned and even overlap so that team members collaborate effectively to meet them.

Organizations that allow themselves to grow haphazardly— perhaps identifying someone internally who “could probably take that job on” — without going through a purposeful process to set clear goals and metrics don’t serve themselves or their employees. A leadership team made up of individuals that don’t know what it would mean to be successful won’t be effective, and poor morale among the team members could lead to attrition and mediocre performance.

Leadership recruitment takes time

Hiring for leadership positions should never be an accelerated process. The ramifications of a poor hire could be significant, so take your time.

As with any hiring process, focus on values and skills, not knowledge. Particular programs or applications will lose their relevance over time. Someone who shares your organization’s values and who is armed with the necessary skills can adapt and grow as the environment changes (and it will).

If you’re searching outside the organization, you’ll likely be leveraging your network and possibly connecting with recruiters. Be transparent about your values and the type of candidates you’re looking for to limit the time spent on individuals that won’t be a good fit for your organization.

If the right candidate is already in your organization, you have the double benefit of hiring someone that already has a deep understanding of the infrastructure and culture and limiting the time and expense of a more substantial recruitment process. While internal hiring is often a successful move, you may want to carefully consider the potential impact if a promotion didn’t work out — do you have a backup plan? Have you jeopardized a relationship with a good employee?

A note on leading during a crisis

The current pandemic and economic crisis have thrown many organizations into chaos. Teams weren’t prepared for a sudden transition to remote work. I’ve found that many of our clients have improved their leadership practices during this time, and they’ve done so organically. To manage the rapidly changing landscape, they’ve incorporated these best practices — delegation, accountability, goal-setting — with lots of communication and clarity.

I’ve been encouraged to see how much positive growth can occur during a time of uncertainty, and perhaps even chaos.

Final thoughts

No one has a 100% success rate building leadership teams. We can all find ourselves guilty of overestimating someone’s potential or being unclear about certain roles or responsibilities. The key is to keep refining your processes and learning from your mistakes so that you start with a team that’s prepared to grow with your organization. Hire slow, fire fast, they say?

It gets more intuitive with experience. It’s helpful to surround yourself with others who have done it - peers, advisors, coaches, and mentors - all with an outside-in perspective.

For executives starting to build a team at a young or small company, or trying to understand where an existing leadership team needs help, an organizational assessment can identify strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities for improvement. Contact us to learn more.