Building a High-Performance Team to Achieve Your 2025 Goals

As we move into 2025, it’s time to start thinking about what you want to accomplish this year. After planning your strategic roadmap and laying out your SMART goals, the next item on your list is to think about the kind of skills your team will need in order to achieve your vision. It’s not too soon to think about hiring—if you wait until growth is beginning to outpace capacity, it’s already too late. To achieve your growth goals, you need a talent plan that will get you from where you are to where you want to be. The time to start developing that plan is now.
Building the right team is part of the growth process and must, like everything else in business, be approached strategically. It cannot be done reactively; it’s not just a matter of hiring extra help because you have the budget to do so. As you are developing your business strategy, spend some time thinking about the talent you already have as well as the talent you’ll need.
Identifying Talent Gaps
You might already have some of that talent within your organization. To find it, we use the talent map, a tool that lets employees self-identify their strengths and weaknesses. On a scale of 0 to 10, employees rate their theoretical and practical knowledge in a number of areas. As it is a self-assessment, it’s not an exact science; it’s more of a way to measure each team member’s comfort level with a particular body of practical or theoretical knowledge. As employees rate themselves and see how their colleagues rate themselves, their self-assessment might change. The important thing is that you’re getting an idea of what skills you have at your disposal and where you will need either additional help or additional training.
Employees might rate themselves highly in unexpected categories. In these cases, you could follow up with these employees and see if they’d like additional training or to take on a new role that makes use of those skills. Once you’ve identified your team’s talents and compared them to the skills you need to achieve your goals, you can begin looking outside of the organization.
Strategy Informs Hiring Decisions
Strategy begins with what you sell and how you sell it. The “what” is about your operations framework, and the “how” encompasses the resources and technologies that enable sales and marketing. With all of this clearly mapped out, the types of employees you need becomes clear. Consider these three different strategies:
- Bring more innovative products to market this year
- Become more competitive on price
- Drive repeat business by improving customer service
Each of these goals requires different kinds of employees. If competing on price, for example, means manufacturing with new, low-cost materials, your hiring strategy is going to be about finding people who know how to work with those new materials if you don’t currently have them in your team.
When you bake hiring strategy into your overall business strategy, which includes identifying the technology you’ll need to meet your goals, you’ll also gain a clear picture of the technology skills potential candidates will need. This includes proficiency both in the tech you’re using now and the systems you will implement as you grow.
Hiring is Marketing
In this age of LinkedIn and AI tools that automatically apply to hundreds of jobs in seconds, it’s easy for HR departments to find themselves so swamped with applications that they let ideal candidates slip through the cracks. Seeking out the right candidates and evaluating resumes will take time, so solicit resumes before the position opens up.
Your website should have a section called “careers” or something similar that can serve as an advertisement for your organization. Show those interested in working for you a little bit about who you are, what it’s like to work for you, and what kind of person thrives in your organization. List not only the positions you are currently hiring for but also positions you will be hiring for in the future.
Gain a Clear Vision of the Road Ahead
The main roadblock to finding the right candidate is a lack of a strategic approach to hiring. With a hiring strategy in place, you’ll have a clear vision of the future. You’ll be able to identify the departments that will need help, and you’ll know the skills you currently have, the skills new employees will need, and the level of experience required to help you reach your destination.
Are You Ready to Do Better Growth Management?
StrategyWerx is all about growth strategy and management. That means giving you the tools you need to develop sound strategies, structure your organization to lay the track ahead of the train, and implement the tools you need to grow. Ready to learn more about how we do that? Book a free consult and bring your questions. See if you like working with us on our dime, and get some good advice in the process.