How to Create Your Ideal Team Mix?

I love this conversation. As a leader, it's your responsibility to create your ideal team mix.

And when I talk about recruitment strategy, I mean these three things - there's Recruiting, there's Re-recruiting and there is De-recruiting.

Recruiting is of course the process of onboarding a new team member or enhancing the skills of existing ones. I wanted to particularly focus on Re-Recruiting and De-Recruiting.

With Re-recruitment, what you want to do is reroute anyone who you want to be in the game, aka your most valuable players, into the business. You want to let them know what are the best things about being part of the team.

And my favourite exercise to do is asking the following questions: What's one word, three words, or five words that best describe being part of the team? What do you like most about being part of the team? What do you like most about our brand? About our business?

This does two things immediately. It reminds people of what's great about the business and the second thing is you can make a summary of the points and publish them on a flip chart or a document, making it a valuable recruitment tool.

Now, De-recruitment is really simple. Is there someone in your team you need to do a clean up conversation with? I call this the step up or step out conversation.

You can say something like, "Hey, I want to apologise to you. I haven't addressed this issue with you. But look, the way you're operating doesn't fit our culture. Moving forward, we've got two options here right now. Number one, and my preferred option, is you step up to a new level of performance. But if you choose not to step up, I am going to respect your decision to step out.

Why don't you reflect on this over the next 24 hours? Let's sit down and have a discussion about it. If you decide to stay as part of the team, absolutely, let's build a 30-day plan of what it looks like."

When you have your ideal team mix in place, I guarantee it's easier to achieve your overall goals.