Managing A World Class Team: Part 2 – Recruitment Time (again)

It’s team talking time.

And even though we’ve done this post before, we’re going to touch on a little topic we’ve covered in the past.

Job Descriptions. (Are you up to speed with the World Class Team series? Read Part One here: Kicking Goals! )

At Tenfold Business Coaching, we love job descriptions.

We eat, sleep and dream about Job Descriptions.

Ok, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but after years of coaching and doing what we do, we’ve learnt that they’re a brilliant tool to getting the most out of any sales team.

But rather than look at them in the context of getting people on board (check our previous recruitment series for a reminder), we’re now going to focus on how we can get the best out of our sales people.

After all, they’re emotional creatures.

So let’s sit down and have a chat. Grab a coffee, strap in and welcome to the exciting world of managing a team!

Job Descriptions 101

Let’s get the message across early and quickly:

Job descriptions are NOT Motherhood statements (bad news for the buzz word users).

Instead, similar to their usage in recruitment, job descriptions for managing teams are short, sharp (no more than 2 pages) documents that separate spans of control through simple, guided language.

We’re not writing a piece for a Pulitzer Prize here. Keep it sharp, keep it simple, keep it specific.

Business is a Team Game

We love teams. We work in a team, we’ve coached teams, we have lunch together as a team (check out our previous post on lunches, you may even find a new place to eat dumplings around South Yarra and Melbourne).

But sometimes it’s hard for employees to understand where they sit. What better way then to give direction to the members of a team?

Job descriptions should show how everybody links together, how what they do is important and how, little by little, they build a congruent business built for success.

Be the Boss

Autonomy in the workplace is a funny thing. In some industries, letting your employees run free is a sure route to success. In others, it will mean immediate failure.

For sales teams, the manager is king.

That means the job descriptions should be written by the managers as they have a bird’s eye view of the business.

Keeping everyone coherent and congruent is key to building the job descriptions and in sales generally, so why would you let your employees run riot?

It doesn’t make sense, so keep it all under your umbrella.

…But Don’t Forget About the Worker Bees
It’s wonderful to create a job description, save it in your folder and never look at it again without consulting the creators of wealth.

For the purpose of being successful, and building a business, it’s essential to get the descriptions across to your employees and explain to them in black and white (or yellow and black, in the case of bees) terms about what they need to do.

After all, ambiguity is the mother of all…

I’m sure you can fill in the rest.

Play to Perform

Finally, job descriptions drive performance.

Not only in their actual adoption, but through performance reviews, you’ve got a solid base to appraise, analyse and improve your staff to team success.

Appraise Us!

So, have you got a specific way that you write your descriptions that lead to success? Maybe short and sharp wins the race, or simple language is your motif.

Give us a yell and tell us how you use job descriptions to keep your sales team on task.

Or maybe you don’t think job descriptions are useful.

We always love a chat, even if you think we’re completely wrong!