While it’s a start, it’s not enough to just bring together a team of high performers when beginning to scale your Amazon business. Building high performing teams requires nurturing new starters and keeping established team members on track. Titan Leader Chris Rawlings has started enough businesses (and made enough mistakes) to create high performing teams.
6 Ways Amazon Sellers Run High Performing Teams
- Weekly Strategy Meeting
- Video Updates
- Live Observation
- Slack Channels
- Daily Scrum
- Feedback Review
Why Is Feedback So Important For Team Members?
Some of the most boring concepts from the corporate world you left behind circle back and save your ass when you start to scale. Feedback is one of the most important when it comes to setting up new team members for success. It’s one of the core ways any complex system adapts and develops, especially companies. The speed and efficiency of the feedback systems, and in general the feedback culture you employ determine how fast you can adapt and grow as an organization.
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The Importance Of Onboarding
Take new team members onboarding for example. You are not being a good boss if you are not giving feedback to your new employee or team member.
If you want your employee to have high, strict standards of performance, you have to hold them to those high standards, especially during their onboarding period and the first few months after that. This is their “programming period” where they begin to learn what kind of behavior is ok and what kind of behavior is not ok. This is the ground-floor level of where culture is defined.
My style of leadership has always been to give a high degree of trust and ownership to my new team members, and to give them freedom to accomplish goals in their own way.
I’m still this way, but what I had to learn the hard way is that setting clear goals and getting great people in the seats to achieve them isn’t enough. People need continuous feedback to know if they are performing well along the way. You need less and less of this over time, and after a while very sparsely just for course correction.
How To Run High Performing Teams
Take new team members onboarding for example. You are not being a good boss if you are not giving feedback to your new employee or team member.
If you want your employee to have high, strict standards of performance, you have to hold them to those high standards, especially during their onboarding period and the first few months after that. This is their “programming period” where they begin to learn what kind of behavior is ok and what kind of behavior is not ok. This is the ground-floor level of where culture is defined.
My style of leadership has always been to give a high degree of trust and ownership to my new team members, and to give them freedom to accomplish goals in their own way.
I’m still this way, but what I had to learn the hard way is that setting clear goals and getting great people in the seats to achieve them isn’t enough. People need continuous feedback to know if they are performing well along the way. You need less and less of this over time, and after a while very sparsely just for course correction.
Best Platform for Hiring A-Player Team Members
Most importantly the weekly strategy meeting. Here they have to report on their progress on initiatives from the last week and the next week, and report their KPI’s. Feedback can be delivered live here to keep people on track.
Team Progress Report
Have the team member record a loom of an activity for you to review and provide written feedback on the process via slack / email. I do this a lot. I tell my team to record looms of them actually performing the duty as they do it for me to critique.
Live Observation
Live observation of the team member via zoom while they are executing a responsibility
Slack Channels
Dedicated Slack channels where updates and results are published for feedback and coaching if needed.
Daily Scrum
A powerful daily meeting rhythm in which you meet with a team aiming to accomplish a specific goal for no more than 15 minutes. Similar to the weekly meeting the focus of what got done yesterday, what will get done today, what is blocking.
Feedback Review
360 Feedback review is a structured way to request overall performance feedback from people working under, over, and alongside the team member. I actually don’t use this because it is a little too thorough for me, instead I used a slimmed down simple version that allows teammates to get feedback from one another periodically and simply.
The bigger you grow and the further you get the more important this concept will be. Eventually your impact on your growth is not about what you can achieve yourself, but how you can unlock your team’s ability to achieve. This is when you circle back around and realize some of the corporate bs you wrote off might actually be useful (even if it needs to be updated/innovated).
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