When you first start your business, you’ll probably have to do everything on your own – from conducting cold calls to branding to marketing and everything in between. But the growth of your business is predicated upon finding capable employees who can share in your burden of running the company.
Take a cursory look at the most successful businesses, and you’ll find that all of them have one thing in common – core team members who have a strong foundation of teamwork and communication. It wouldn’t affect the business operations if you were to remove the founder from the picture.
In business – there is power in numbers. It’s why giants like Amazon and Alphabet Inc. have thousands of employees in different parts of the world.
One of the hallmarks of a successful business is that they are not affected by disruptions in leadership. They always have redundancies in place to ensure smooth operation to minimize disruption if your business changes hands.
This characteristic allows teams to tough it out against all odds. So if a key person like the founder were to remove themselves from the business’s operations, someone in the team would pick up the mantle and soldier on.
Prospective buyers who care about the bottom line know all too well that the value of your business and the profit it generates depends entirely on the people running the show. Selling your business at a premium value requires you to have collaborative employees in place. If key executives are addicted to you being around and micromanaging things – it’s time for you to wean them off of your presence slowly and gradually.
To move beyond the founder’s influence, employees must integrate themselves into the inner machinations of the firm and run as a single, cohesive unit. As a founder, it is upon you to create ideal conditions that will allow employees to take ownership of the product. Allow them to take greater ownership of the product, sales, and if possible, profits.
How to Test Teamwork in Your Business
Ask your key executives to no longer loop you in on the business’s day-to-day operations, barring, of course, essential departments such as sales and financials.
Now measure your profits for the week.
Do they increase, decrease, or stay right on course as planned (holding all things constant)?
If you notice a steep decline in profits, your team is struggling to communicate properly without you keeping things organized. It’s time to step in and make some sweeping changes to facilitate collaboration and teamwork.
How to Improve Communication Among Team Members
The best way to improve communication and collaboration is to make it easy for your employees.
Deploy workplace collaboration tools such as Teams and Zoom when communicating with employees. This inspires your teams to use these tools for their projects.
You can also create an environment where employees view each other as friends rather than competitors. Studies show that women who have a best friend to keep them company are twice as likely to be engaged than colleagues who don’t. As the owner, you can help create productive friendships in the company by encouraging interaction.
Integrate Your Operations With a Corporate Social Network
Speaking of friendships, the best way to foster relationships between employees is to make it easy to share knowledge and expertise across different business units (while keeping things confidential). This is where a hybrid collaboration tool like Teams comes in – it can catalyze workplace productivity by mimicking the social networking characteristics of Facebook and Twitter.
Ready to sell your business? Schedule a meeting with Serdar Kabul, a leading business broker in New Zealand, to find your options.