Every business owner strives to make better decisions. However, making good decisions consistently is incredibly challenging.
In most cases, there is no way to have all the information about every variable involved before making a decision. This creates uncertainty in the direction you take your business.
But even though there will always be some degree of uncertainty, there is plenty of available data options to add a significant amount of concrete explanation to back your decision-making. This includes making decisions about your team. In fact, if you aren’t already using data to build your startup team, you’ve come to the right place.
This article will give you an overview of how and why data should be used to build your startup team.
Implement Data-Driven Leadership
Data-driven leadership focuses on managing your team through the use of data to support your decision-making. This leadership style helps to reinforce a transparent and effective communication style with your team.
When they understand where you assign value and the reasons behind your decisions, they’ll be able to understand your thought process and make more effective contributions.
Your leadership style serves as the foundation for current employees and every new hire that is added to your team, so you want to make sure you are implementing the right practices.
Here are three ways in which you can bring data-driven leadership into your team:
- Explain the impact each KPI has on your business.
- Explain how your teams’ work connects to the metrics you track. This way, they can see an objective measure of how they move the business forward.
- Set precise data-backed goals so team members can track their progress.
Hiring the Right Skill Sets
As mentioned earlier, data plays a big role in helping you make decisions for your business. It shows where you are succeeding and what areas of your business need work, and from there you can set goals and make adjustments to get to where you want to be.
Once you’ve set goals for your business, you can then go forward with looking for the talent with the skill sets needed to help you reach those goals.
Here are a few benefits to using this approach to hiring:
- It helps you prioritize hires that will make the most significant impact on your goals.
- It helps you define the roles of your new hires objectively.
- You will be able to determine the financial impact that each new hire can have.
Define Roles and Responsibilities
One of the biggest challenges every startup faces is the overabundance of tasks and objectives. This makes prioritizing extremely difficult since everything on the to-do list is essential and critical. In turn, it is challenging for new hires to grasp where they should focus their attention.
By taking a data-driven approach to defining your new hire’s roles and responsibilities you will:
- Be able to create a clear and objective job description.
- Empower your new hires to find the most effective solution to meet the goals laid out in their job description.
- Help your new hires understand the impact they’ll have on the organization.
Use Data as a Selling Point
Today, the bottleneck to many startup’s growth isn’t funding or cash flow. It’s being able to scale their human resource. Finding and convincing top talent to join your startup is challenging due to scarcity in the talent pool and the competitive nature of the startup job market.
However, top talent is searching for positions with well-established processes that rely on data. Make sure you use this demand to sell your startup to your new hire. Said differently, let your data paint a clear picture to your new hire about how their future will look working with you.
So as you being the hiring process, remember to make sure your data is organized and poised for growing your startup, because it will help you attract top talent.
Work with an Experienced Accounting Partner
Every organization can benefit from using data to make their hiring decisions, but for startups, it can be a determining factor in their success. With less of a safety net, one wrong hiring decision can leave a massive impact.
If you are finding yourself needing to use data to make your hiring decisions, but don’t have the bandwidth, consider working with an accounting partner, like Pasquesi Partners who are focused on helping startups reach their goals.
We will work with you to make sure you are collecting the right metrics to build a strong team.
Click here to set up a consultation with one of our financial experts to explore all the ways in which we can help you implement data-driven decision-making to grow your team.