Have you ever felt like Elon Musk must feel when he has a great idea? You can see it. It’s the next step to the destination outcomes that you are striving for.
Then your stomach begins to sink as reality sets in.
Your team already has a backlog of actions. Your team just doesn’t seem to follow through.
You can’t walk the walk!
Many companies seem to stall before achieving $5 million and around $20 million of annual revenue.
The issue is capacity – Often, CEO business owners do not build the management or employee capacity they need to soar. B and C-players will not get you there.
In this Smart CEO article, I will cover Recruiting, Onboarding, and Continuous Mastery of best practices. Our Growth CFOs learned these best practices from working with hundreds of CEOs globally and from decades of experience. The methods are battle tested.
Recruiting – Increasingly People Capacity becomes the number one obstacle to growth. Labor shortages, quiet quitting, and #workyourwage are making recruiting immensely more difficult. We advocate instead of relaxing your standards, create a work environment culture that people seek and elevate your selection criteria.
Consider this Recruiting Checklist:
- Your Why – revitalize your vision, mission, and living to values
- Globalization – virtual work is proven; recruit globally to get the best talent
- Natural Fit – measure the candidate’s natural fit for the job using a tool such as the culture index and use separate tools to identify values fit
- Skill Assessment – make sure they have the basic knowledge and skill
- TopGrading Interviews – use Brad Smart’s method
Onboarding – The first three to six months are critical to set team members up for success. I advise cutting dead weight fast – seriously, if a person is on day 5 and still hasn’t taken the step to do day 1 work, you have a miss-hire. Let them go with love and respect. As long as the new hire does the work to take steps, they will get into the performance zone.
Consider this Onboarding Checklist:
- Job-Specific Functional Training
- The Company Way Certification – develop a formal certification program; our employees complete an eight-week certification program as they work in the second seat
- Shadow Existing Team Members – new employees work side by side with existing employees but quickly take the lead for this work; you do not want to create dependencies
Continuous Mastery – Talent gets stale fast if it’s not developed continuously. Plus, talent is not optimized unless intentionally cultivated, so hire people with a learning mindset (only 25% do). Malcolm Gladwell established that it takes 10,000 to reach mastery in his book the Outliers.
Consider this Continuous Mastery Checklist:
- Individual Development Plan – establish that managers meet weekly with each employee to develop their skills using a written development plan; this is skill development, not customer task level work
- Weekly Self Lead Skill Development – based on the initial skill assessment that you did during recruiting, develop a learning journey customized for each employee; Skill Soft is an excellent platform for this
- Monthly Internal Peer Mastermind – to facilitate peer experience share and cross-functional collaboration, establish internal monthly masterminds; make sure that members are from different functions across the company to expand thinking beyond silos
Use your Financial Flight Plan to run “what-if” scenarios. This ensures that you map out timing based on affordability and choose the best path. Building capacity proactively will help you avoid common pitfalls. In addition, you and your team have time to learn and do version two when needed.
Chapter 6 of my book – The Growth CFO Void – describes the Five Obstacles to Growth. People Capacity is one of them.
How Foresight CFO Is Different from Other Outsourced CFO Services?
At Foresight CFO, our Growth CFOs do Destination and Follow Through work with CEO business owners globally. We deploy Growth CFOs in 3-person teams to go well beyond what any One CFO could ever do. Schedule a 25-minute Discovery Consultation with me