Four Skills To Look For As You Build A Team

As you bring people together to complete new and ambitious projects, here are four skills you should look for as you’re putting your team together.

Communication

Everybody has an opinion about just about everything. You need to find someone who has very high emotional intelligence. A great tailor can find fabrics that their clients love and put them together in ways that they love even more. Great communicators can work out how each individual team member feels about aspects of a project and can then find exactly the right words to persuade them to support the consensus view. The last thing you want is for your project to tank as tempers flare. A good communicator will stop this from happening.

Tranquillity

Your team will face highly pressurised situations as your project reaches its climax. You need to find someone who can stay calm under pressure and maintain a laser focus on the overall goal, no matter how tense a situation may get. They also need to keep the budget in mind, to save your team, and maybe your business, from facing cash flow problems, or an awkward conversation for you with your financier, due to excessive spending.

Creativity

Creative members of the team are very often misunderstood by their colleagues. It can often be thought that they spend the day wondering round in their own world. Although this is a gross generalisation, it is true that they might adopt their own working styles that might not totally align with their employers’ office cultures. Judging creative team members negatively because of this misses the point of why they play such a crucial role. What you’re looking for is that one moment of brilliance, where they see things that nobody else can see and suggest an idea that makes the impossible possible. Your team will be impoverished if it doesn’t include a creative member. As long as their conclusions result in innovations that push your projects forward, don’t worry too much about how they reached them.

Analysis

Someone has the wonderful task of reading through reams of reports, client data, industry statistics and legal information. Then they have the joy of condensing all of that information into another report that forecasts how successful your project will be. The analyst’s job is to join the dots to create the bigger picture from which the rest of the team can work. Attention to detail is absolutely key here. An almost super-powered concentration span is definitely a bonus as well. Your analyst needs to be able to find the information that your competitors can’t find. How they communicate the information is not vitally important. Your communicator can do the talking later.

Bringing it together

When combined, these skills have the potential to give you a highly productive team, capable of creating innovative projects that can carry your business years into the future, and several light years ahead of your competitors.