I want to develop my management team, but I don’t know how. Help.

You might remember that last week I wrote about a CEO and his unfortunate experience with a general manager. I had a few people contact me for some pointers on what qualities to look for in a management team and how to develop them. I thought I would share them with you too.

In an ideal world businesses would have perfect CEOs and management teams. But growing a business often means making the best of what’s available. At any point in time we hire the best people we can find with one eye on what we need today and the other on what we need in the future. Sometimes we don’t get that latter bit quite right.

I’m sure that’s why entrepreneurial CEOs often tell me that their management teams aren’t doing enough to propel the company’s growth. At the time of hiring the team the business need was very technical, very functional. Today it’s grown bigger than that.

So, putting aside, for the purposes of this article, the strengths, weaknesses or other criticisms we may like to level at our fellow CEOs and acknowledging that on a practical level we are not going to replace our team with perfect specimens, here is a realistic look at how we can inspire and develop our people to help our businesses grow.

The easy bit is the framework: we need an understanding of the qualities we are looking for; a way of assessing our people against them; and finally some sort of help in plugging the gaps.

But I often meet businesses stuck at the first hurdle. They are finding it difficult to decide exactly what the ‘growth qualities’ are. So for a short cut, if you don’t want to work up your own, five that seem to serve a lot of businesses well are:

1. External focus. An outlook of ‘what’s better for the customer’.
2. Creativity. Showing at least a little imagination and ingenuity.
3. Decisiveness. Has clear thinking and is able to make decisions quickly and firmly.
4. Inclusiveness. Thinks about implications for the wider business, not just their function.
5. Functional expertise. Knows their stuff.

The next step also proves unpopular – assessing your people against these qualities. My suggestion for ease here is that you take a tip from a client of mine who devised a very simple 360 degree internal survey across just these five areas.

His objective was not to get an in-depth analysis but just a sense of the ranking of the five criteria across the business. If you too are put off by the logistics of a professional survey, and just want to work out which growth quality to focus on first, then something like this would probably suffice.

The final, but most important step is how to then develop the growth qualities. This seems to work best when the business picks its most needy ‘growth quality’ to work on and does so across all of its leaders.

To ‘work on’ doesn’t mean you have to ship everyone off on a course. Some of the most effective education I have seen has been run internally. Great examples include:

• Internal workshops to reinvigorate the foundations of the business: the goals, the purpose, the plan, so as to provide a framework for decision making and enhance the external focus.
• Creativity breakfasts to share tools and methods of unleashing imagination.
• Monthly lunchtime learnings for the team to get together for business education.

Working together on the ‘growth qualities’ is a neat way of acknowledging that none of us are perfect. And that includes the CEO.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).

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