How to Build a Management Team

Assuming you already have a great idea, a leadership team is crucial for executing. Among the most important decisions to make is who to put on this team and how to make them effective.

1. Identify skill gaps

When figuring out your management team, start by taking inventory of the current team’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, if both you and your cofounder come from a sales background, it will likely just lead to frustration by hiring another sales leader. Instead, you likely need to focus on engineering and product.

2. Hire people better than you

Always hire people that can teach you, not people who require you to teach them. I made this mistake frequently at my first company. If I am starting a sales organization, I should start by hiring someone that can ultimately lead sales, not someone who can take prospecting/demos off of my own plate in the short term.

3. Define their roles

As you are building a management team, it’s critical to define what everyone’s role is and how it is unique in the organization. If there is a CTO and VP Engineering, there should be no ambiguity between what each’s responsibilities are.

4. Hold them accountable

Quality management teams must be held accountable for results to ensure the company is getting a strong ROI on paying them. Consider a tool like Weekly Update where every Friday, each leader shares their top objectives, concerns and plan for next week. This ensure we capture important information in writing and can be efficient with the Monday morning leadership meeting.