Team

Growth is a team sport. Hiring the right people, keeping them engaged, giving them honest feedback and building a culture that attracts more of the same is what turns a founder-led business into a company that can scale without the founder in every meeting. In the Scaling Up framework this is the People decision, and it sits alongside strategy, execution and cash as one of the four things every growth business has to get right.

This section gathers our articles on building and running high performance teams. They cover the full cycle, from deciding who you need to dealing with the people who are no longer the right fit.

Right people, right seats. The talent assessment chart is the tool we use to work out who your A-players are and who is in the wrong role. It pairs with the functional accountability chart, which makes sure every key function in the business has one clearly accountable owner, and the process accountability chart, which does the same for the processes that cut across departments.

Hiring and inclusion. Five strategies to improve diversity and inclusion in recruiting looks at how to widen the pool without lowering the bar, and the art of recruiting a manager covers the hire that most often goes wrong in a growing business.

Engagement and retention. The hidden cost of employee turnover explains why disengagement starts months before anyone resigns, and how to retain your A-team gives five practical ways to keep the people you cannot afford to lose.

Trust, culture and ways of working. How to build trust with your team, wherever they work is written for the hybrid reality most of our clients now live in, and breaking free from the busyness trap looks at why a team that is always busy is rarely a team that is performing.

Meetings that people value. A team's rhythm shows in its meetings. How to improve your team's mental health with a weekly meeting is a good example of a small, repeatable habit that changes how a team feels about its work.

Culture as you grow. Culture is what the team does when nobody is watching, and it is easily diluted by rapid hiring. How to maintain your culture during rapid growth, engage, empower, excel and turning a group of individuals into a high performance team cover how to protect and build it deliberately.

The latest articles are below, newest first. Our leadership, strategy and implementation sections cover the rest of the picture. If you want to understand how your own team is wired, our DISC profiling and training workshops are a practical next step.