So in this video, I'll explain why your team needs complementary skills. I'll describe the importance of hiring team members for their behavioral skills as well as their skills, knowledge and experience. I'll share 14 questions to help you identify your team's current skill, knowledge or behavior gap. And finally, I'll give you three different ways you can use these questions to help your team grow and develop together. So when you're hiring people, especially I find in startups or small businesses, it's natural to want to recruit people who are like you because you think you'll get along. But this can be a mistake.

One entrepreneur I worked with some years ago had recruited a series of mini me's male like him similar age, similar temperament, similar background. It was a disaster, an office full of alpha males, and their similarities cause clashes and conflict. Everybody wants to do the big high profile client work and to be in the limelight, but not much else. So things got missed. Nobody was focusing on the detail. And as you can imagine, clients complained, and they lost business as a result.

So that's potentially what can happen when your team lacks complementary or different skills that complement one another. So as a team leader, you need to think about not just the different skills you need in your team, but of course, also the knowledge, the experience, and the mindset and behaviors that are required to help your team to be successful. So do you want people with a can do mindset a willingness to learn and grow? Of course you do. And what sort of behaviors are important? Do they need to have good listening skills?

Do they need to be able to get build relationships very good. Well to have empathy, to be strong influences to show compassion decisiveness, because it's really important to remember that you can give people who already have the right mindset and behavior, some new skills much, much more easily than you can change the negative mindset or behavior of someone who has a lot of skills and knowledge and experience. Because the thing is the most talented expert in the world will fail if he or she doesn't want to work well with your colleagues, with your clients, with your customers, and doesn't contribute to your collective common purpose. I think it's particularly important not only to think about this in the context of what you need now, but what you're going to need in the future. There are a variety of ways you can approach this. My suggestion is that you first start by looking at the set of 14 questions that I've put together for you in the resources section and this will help you to focus on your team's current skills, knowledge and behavior, and also the required future skills, knowledge and behavior that you're likely to need.

You can use a version of these questions to help you focus on mindset and experience to, or anything else that's important to your team success. The 14 questions will help you identify where your team strengths lie, and also where the gaps might be. I'm not going to go through all 14 questions here, but I just wanted to give you a flavor of the first four questions around behavior. Here they are, what behaviors do each of us need to demonstrate for this team to be successful? Number two, what Positive Behavior do we see already in this team, from individual team members and from the whole team when we're together? What behaviors Do we need to stop or start to be more successful and what happen if we don't develop these behaviors now and in the future?

What will be the impact on our business on our customers? And on our common purpose in the short and longer term? How can we learn the behaviors that might be lacking? Who do we know that can help us? You find the other questions on the checklist in the resources section. Now, there are three simple ways you might choose to use these questions.

Firstly, as a team leader, you can work through the questions on your own and draw up a prioritized action plan to help your existing team acquire the necessary skills, knowledge and behavior over a period of time, sort of like a team development plan. You can use them as part of your recruitment process to make sure you're covering all the bases. And finally, you can involve the whole team. It's a great team exercise for opening up a dialogue therapy noticing the team strengths and for allowing the team to talk about the areas they feel they'd like to develop. Now if you do this as a team exercise, it's very important to remember what I said about high performing teams back when I gave you that team definition. If you remember I said that high performing teams are deeply committed to one another's personal growth and success.

So if you do this exercise, you want to tick that box as it were, you want to make the exercise developmental, rather than critical and an opportunity for people to have a go at each other. So here's how I found it works best. Firstly, get each individual to identify his or her own development areas first, and then ask for feedback from the rest of the team who can simply agree or disagree. So for example, Steve might say he needs to be more succinct in meetings. Each member of the team simply says agree or disagree. Secondly, each team member is able to identify one key strength that each of his or her colleagues have and share that with the team.

So Steve might say, I believe Anne's key skill is in building good relationships with our customers. And the responses are simple Thank you. done this way, it becomes the positive emotional and motivational exercise rather than opportunity to find fault with it with others or to blame. It builds trust and openness rather than mistrust, and creates a sense of honesty and all being in together as the leader you take part in that exercise to once you know where your gaps are, there were a variety of ways to get the skills, knowledge and behaviors you need in play. You don't necessarily have to spend thousands on external training programs. In fact, in the next video, I'm going to identify for you 10, creative and often very cost effective ways to help your team develop the skills, knowledge and behavior that might be missing right now.