Building a high-performance team starts with diligence in the hiring process

Business is all about winning. Great companies win. Weak companies lose. Anyone can have a vision, but few are able to execute the vital people processes needed to achieve greatness.
When you start your business it’s not about winning, it’s about survival. But after some hardships, struggles and a few early successes, your business begins to grow.
Time passes. Suddenly you lurch from survival to growth mode. If you’ve surrounded yourself with good people, you have some help for the journey. At first, everyone can do everything and they don’t mind. But eventually your jack-of-all-trades fellowship starts showing some holes. Now you need some specialists to take your business to the next level.
Building a high-performance team
It begins with recruiting — attracting best-fit people to your front door. Just as great leadership begins with self-awareness, so does business success. By analyzing and understanding who you really are and why you exist, you can determine who best fits your team. But getting best-fit applicants is only the beginning.
Next you need to enforce science and discipline in your hiring process. Is it better to hire for experience and skills or focus on an applicant’s character? Have you ever hired someone who had an impressive resume, only to be let down by substandard performance? We all have.
You have to look deeper into the characteristics that are not easily changed: values, motivations and personality. These traits don’t show up on a resume. Invest in validated, job-specific pre-employment assessments and always conduct structured, behaviorally anchored job interviews. This is the single most important process you can use to achieve long-term success.
Best-fit, culture fit
Once you hire that best-fit candidate, based on character not experience, you need to align them with your business and culture. Role alignment brings people together to form cohesive teams and orientation is the best time to do it. New employees are apprehensive. They just made a big decision to join you. They’re concerned. How will they be treated? What’s expected?
Unfortunately, orientation is often a mismatched bunch of activities that convolute lingering hiring steps, on-boarding and paperwork into a whirlwind of activity. Instead, use this time to embrace your new employees. Tell them how happy you are to have them on the team. Tell them what they can expect and what you’ll expect in return.
Over time, you need to provide ongoing education, training and guidance, but it all begins with hiring best-fit people and getting them aligned with who you are and why you exist. In my own company, we hire top performers. But more importantly, we look for people who are a best fit to our culture. We hire people who love what we do and what we have to offer.

There are thousands good companies, but only a few great ones. The great ones have one thing in common: a commitment to having only best-fit people. They focus on their people processes: recruiting, hiring, orientation, education, training and performance support. These strategies form the foundation for building and maintaining a high-performance team.