When you begin to scale a company, chaos may take over and before you know it, you may have a lot more issues to deal with rather than just managing the squad. Managing a fast-growing team is particularly challenging, but certain approaches can help you succeed with the task in the long run.
I spoke with Krzysztof Marszałek, Co-Founder of Software Brothers and Chief Sales Officer in RST Software. Kris has several companies in his management portfolio and the largest team he managed grew from a handful to 60 employees. He shared with me his five tried-and-tested rules he sticks to when growing his current team. Let’s get started!
Rule #1: Start slow
When you focus on scaling a company fast, it’s easy to put too much on the plate of a new team member. This will essentially prevent them from grasping their entire role – it can result from the fact that they are only getting to know the organization and/or find it hard to imagine all the steps they must take to achieve the general goal.
To avoid such situations, the manager should think about what kind of people they should surround themselves with in the first place. With that, they will know how to approach those new employees in an effort to build an effective team.
Let's imagine you are starting to scale a company. In this scenario, you have to be aware of who is very task-oriented and who is more project-oriented. For instance, if a person wants to work from 9-5 and needs to receive detailed tasks, that’s totally fine, but the question is: will such a person be a good fit for the project and the entire team?
Rule #2: Thoroughly test people before hiring
Of course, hiring the right people is crucial and your HR specialists will help you with that, but we want to stress that it's highly important to get the right people for the job and those that would fit your management style. Building effective teams starts with hiring just the right people for the job as well.
This is critical especially from the soft skills perspective. Do not hesitate to send them a candidate an open task to complete to see what their way of thinking is. Moreover, you can even extend the recruitment process to find out if they have the soft skills and approach you require to succeed with the project.
For instance, if you were to look for a Sales Development Representative, ask them to identify a target group that fits into your client characteristics and prepare an email campaign for that group. This task can be approached in different ways and is something that requires critical thinking.
Just by seeing how a candidate approaches such tasks can tell the manager a lot about their approach to work – whether they ask supplemental questions, what is their way of thinking and how they understand quality – all of these aspects can tell about their general attitude and how they can be best managed when they expand the team.
Rule #3: Approach onboarding strategically and systematically
When scaling a company and getting new employees on board, it’s crucial to onboard them gradually and extend their areas of responsibility at the same pace as well. If your company is already fast-paced and you hire a marketing director, you cannot task him with building an entire marketing department right away – it’s simply not going to work, no matter how extensive their experience is.
When new people join an organization, they can easily get lost because they aren’t familiar with the internal processes, the history of the organization and informal ways to best approach certain tasks.
If you’re oriented at building effective teams, it’s best to give new people a piece to work on at a time. It’s not about depreciating their competencies, but having a systematic approach. If we are to build a marketing department, let’s start with establishing the strategy. If that strategy consists of six different departments or divisions, let’s start working on them one by one, instead of trying to build everything at once.
What’s the best approach to planning and prioritizing the areas to deal with in the first place? This is something that usually comes with experience. As you see companies and teams develop, you will gradually learn what chunks will be important at which stage, or what you first need to build in order to move forward. You can’t work on developing specializations like our location-based service, map development, media streaming or data visualization teams without building your core business first.
Rule #4: Implement relevant metrics gradually
Implementing relevant work evaluation metrics is also critical for building effective teams, with a focus on setting indicators that define when work has been done well. The KPIs are important for both the management (to be able to look at the bigger picture across all departments) and the new employees (to guide them in their daily activities), however, they aren’t always easy to establish.
For instance, creating indicators for content creation isn’t clear-cut – while it’s easy to assess whether a content piece was written in an informative way and without mistakes, evaluating its performance isn’t as straightforward. First of all, it will take time to see how the content performs, whether SEO was approached well and what results the content brings. For that reason, many indicators cannot be set at the outset.
When managing a growing team as you scale a company, most KPIs should never be set upfront, but worked out gradually. Also, your employee is the master of their trade, so leave setting the relevant KPIs to them, or at least do it jointly. Don’t do it authoritatively by yourself, otherwise you will be seriously limiting their performance.
Rule #5: Don’t let the processes control you
Relevant processes can be extremely helpful when it comes to building effective teams. When people in an organization are familiar with them and they are designed well, they actually speed up work and make the organization more efficient. However, it’s important not to let the processes take over the control, but to adjust them as needed, so that they work well and let you achieve your goals.
How does this principle work in practice? At RST, we have multiple different processes and procedures for executing projects. Most of them are aligned with Scrum principles. But we don’t try to stick to them forcefully if they don’t work in a given situation.
In line with our processes, we always conduct daily meetings with our clients (which also follows a specific process). However, if we notice that our client doesn’t join in, or often cancels at the last minute, we will stop conducting them and think of another way to effectively communicate with the client. The same principle applies to managing a rapidly expanding team – if a process stops working for us, we either resign from it or adjust it so that it starts working again.
Interested in working with us?
We are a software house supporting innovative companies and startups on their journey to creating functional and beautiful products that stand the test of time. We are convinced that focusing on building effective teams brings our customers closer to product success and growth of their business. If you’re interested in our services, feel free to explore more on our website, or contact us directly at kris@rst.software or magda@rst.software. We’re looking forward to discovering your needs!
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