How to Avoid Excess Turnover and Trust Your Team to Execute

“I can’t get good help!” “If I could just find the right people.” “No one seems to want to work anymore and they keep leaving.” These are common phrases I hear from business owners and executives. I want to talk about how to hire the right person and how to know if you have a good team player working for you. We’ve talked in the past about “Delivering Feedback to Millennials (and everyone else)“, and “Psychological Safety (a critical part of delivering feedback).” Both talked about how to help people improve. Let’s talk about the traits and skills for a good team player. These attributes can all be worked on improved and are not related to skill. The three items you want to look for are :

Humble
Hungry
People Smarts

This list comes from a Book called The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni. I would recommend the book for a deeper study. There are many ways you can define the three and here are some that we have done for a service based business (:

Ideal Team Player	IS	IS NOT
Humble	Asking questions Apologizing for mistakes quickly Accepting apologies Praise your teammates Do “lower level” work for the better of the team Being confident and knowing your abilities and advocating for your own ideas	Thinking you have all the answers Never apologizing Taking 100% of the credit for team work “Not My Job” mentality
Hungry	Going above and beyond (more than the minimum) Looking for ways to contribute without being told Looking for more things to do Take on challenge and tedious tasks Ask “Is there anything I can do for you” to teammates	Taking shortcuts Doing bare minimum Not doing anything to pitch in after your work is done Over Delegating work
People Smarts	Asks customers for their preferred name and uses it at least 4 times during each interaction Introduces themselves formally when they first meet a customer Give feedback to your teammates when you see them not living up to the values of the company and the ideal teammate characteristics Dealing with difficult customer/coworker situations with a smile,using empathy and emphatic speech, and trying to solve the problem at hand instead of saying “We can’t do that”	Gossiping Being rude Bad reviews Not giving feedback to your team Saying all the reasons why something can’t be done

Once you have your list of what each of these three characteristics mean to you then you can start with your existing staff and see which of the three does each posses at a high level. A person can have anywhere from 0 – 3 characteristics you feel they are strong. You can also use this to create interview questions to make sure you find these characteristics in your new employees.

If you want to learn more about how to hire high performing team players apply for a discovery call now and we can do a deep dive discovery of your situation at no cost if you qualify.

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