HR & Team Management

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~$ Checklist for writing an effective job advert

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Consent vs consenous

You must stop mistaking consensus for strong leadership. Sometimes, you think that achieving consensus will unify your team. Yet, as CFO discovered after decades in investment banking and startup finance, consensus can lead to watered-down outcomes. Instead, Egorov reframed his approach, seeking consent rather than consensus. He spent over 17 years at top firms like Goldman Sachs and UBS, navigating complex emerging markets. His insight? Consensus often sacrifices quality. Stop chasing “everyone agrees” Start seeking “everyone understands” Embrace tougher calls for stronger results This mindset shift turned tricky trade-offs into clearer choices, unlocking better decision-making. The payoff? More agile teams, sharper strategies, and resilient growth—even in challenging times. Close that “consensus gap” and adopt a consent-driven approach. You’ll strengthen your leadership and avoid drifting into mediocrity. Subscribe: Georgy’s CFO BOOK PICK: “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker

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Leadership Styles and Questions

Leadership Styles

• What style(s) are you most naturally drawn to?
• What style(s) do you use least?
• Which style would your colleagues respond best to/need most?
• What styles have you appreciated in others?
• How might you improve on your uses of one or more of these leadership styles?
• When you are under pressure what style do you fall back on most?
• Amongst your senior leadership team/board what leadership styles do you use most and least? What are the pros and cons of this?

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Team and Leadership Workshop Notes

Team and Leadership Workshops Notes Below is a list of my notes and insights from the first two team and leadership training sessions at UnLtd. These notes have been compiled together into some sort of logical grouping so that it may be of some use for social entrepreneurs to learn from too. **General Insights **

• Top 20 reasons start-ups fail
• Researching 101 start-ups who failed “not the right team” was position 3rd, with a massive 23% of the reasons for failure. Of note is reason 1 and 2, you’d hope that most social ventures have a market need, their inherent purpose is to serve some sort of need, so hopefully the top reasons significance would be reduced and “ran out of cash” is probably as applicable to social ventures as none social ventures, if not more so.
• By following the link (above) to the article summarising these finding “Not the Right Team” had some underlying issues and remedies in recruitment, onboarding and probation. Something we’ll go into more detail later.
• A useful insight was shared that maybe you can’t find the perfect team, but can you find the perfect goal? Which is a helpful reflection, personalities might clash, or people might have to pick up responsibilities that aren’t perfectly suited to them but if you are all driving towards one shared goal then working together and building a shared understanding of each other is possible. There’s a handy tip further on in this document which goes into “dynamic” job descriptions which alter your employee’s responsibility quarterly dependent on business need.
• A quote from the day has stuck with me:
• “CFO to CEO: What would happen if we trained everyone and they left?
• CEO to CFO: What is we didn’t and they stayed?”

**Leaders and Managers ** Entrepreneurs should be encouraged to think about how they lead their organisations and how they would like to lead. Often looking at the difference between Leaders and Managers is a good starting point for this thought process.  This table from the resource site Business Balls19 is useful for considering what the Entrepreneur does and what needs to be done in the organisation at various times.  The website also notes that “All management responsibilities, including all listed left, (which mostly and typically are delegated to others, ideally aiding motivation and people-development)”20.  There is a further debate around Leadership styles. This questionnaire21 is also useful for an Entrepreneur to reflect on their style and perhaps review their Strengths’ focuses too in this context.  The questionnaire identifies 3 leadership styles:  An authoritarian leadership style is exemplified when a leader dictates policies and procedures, decides what goals are to be achieved, and directs and controls all activities without any meaningful participation by the subordinates. Such a leader has full control of the team, leaving low autonomy within the group22.  Democratic leadership, also known as participative leadership, is a type of leadership style in which members of the group take a more participative role in the decision-making process. Everyone is given the opportunity to participate, ideas are exchanged freely, and discussion is encouraged23.  Laissez-faire leadership, also known as delegative leadership, is a type of leadership style in which leaders are hands-off and allow group members to make the decisions. Researchers have found that this is generally the leadership style that leads to the lowest productivity among group members24.  Building Your Team and** the effects of**** Growth**** on Your Team** Team size is a challenge for many growing organisations, operational growth rarely happens linearly so it makes it difficult to plan in, build and retain capacity. However, some rules of thumb have been identified:

• “Setting the foundation: 1-4 staff members (need a lot of strategic do-ers)
• Building to scale: 5-10 (team management stage)
• Being an organisation: 11+ (transitioning from entrepreneur/founder to CEO)” Think about roles as split into 3 categories:
• Green: Strategy (profit)
• Blue: Revenue (income)
• Red: Back office (cost) An entrepreneur will normally start as one person, as a blue role (with red tasks). They might bring on two more blue roles to help bring in revenue – everyone performing their own red tasks. Eventually they will need to bring in a red role to help with administration, so that the founder can focus on strategy and move into more of a green role. As this point, they will be managing three people, which is the optimum size for a team. 1G 1B 2B 3B 2B 3B 4R As the business grows, perhaps they take on another two blue roles and then need another red role, the founder is then managing 6 people, which can take up over 60% of their time, which means they move into a red role, which can cause the growth of the business to stagnate. To move away from this they could create another red role to manage the red team, and promote a blue role to manage the blue team.

1R 1G 2B 3B 4R 5B 6B 7R 2B 8R 3B 5B 6B 4R 7R Now, there are smaller teams of 3 or 4, which work more effectively and give the founder the chance to move back into a green role. SGFE () have found that certain numbers of people in teams/organisations work, and some really don’t: Number of people: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 A Quick Note on Culture

• Consider having only a few cultural values, potentially no more than 3, else they won’t be remembered.
• Don’t fall into the trap of saying “culture” for meaning “just like me” you need different people in your team. Recruitment**, Hiring, **Headhunting – call it what you will, identifying and filling the right role is vital
• It’s not necessarily just a recycling exercise, when someone leaves it could well be an opportunity to bring in someone better suited to your business needs, that said, typically at the lower levels of recruitment, some like for like hires may need to be made. However, do apply the principles of the following point:
• Any requirement campaign should include not just what people do, but what knowledge, skills, experience are required for the role either in the job advert or preferably in the job description. This should be done with the intention of making any position’s roles, responsibilities and skills measurable. This means you can do the following things:
• Keep it simple for you, your managers and future employees. You want to avoid a shopping list, unless it’s an essential trait, leave it out. This means:
• Performance Management can happen easily and can provide flexibility for your employee to grow and develop the position as the business grows.
• You may have more success in attracting the right person. This can be affected by lots of different things: ease of understanding if the job is for them, knowing if the business is right for them and can even be effected by things like gender, for example research has suggested that men will apply for a job when they meet 60% of the requirements, but women will only apply when they meet 100% of the requirements. Whilst the 100% figure seems a bit high and both seem a bit “round”, I have seen similar statistics before so would suggest there’s a gender bias in existence. This BBC article has some handy tips I’d encourage you to adopt: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44399028
• Recruitment campaigns are expensive and time consuming. Get good at telling your story, and inspire others to tell your story too, develop marketing channels to do this and always be ready to identify talent and keep them looped in about any potential positions you have for them. If you don’t have something right now you might do in a year or two, so anyone you meet at a conference, event, workshop etc. could be a potential employee in the future.
• Two interesting stats:
• Make sure your recruitment process is well thought-out and follows this process:
• Advertising
• Keep the job advert simple, informative and to the point. This isn’t to say don’t have fun, definitely reflect your organisations personality but keep in mind that many candidates are actively seeking their next position, often reading 100s of adverts every week.
• A good template to follow is: “Job Title, Salary (plus benefits), FTE One-line description of the candidate you are looking for (as this is often all that appears on the job boards brief description of the job) Background of the business Overview of the role and responsibilities Experience, skills, requirements Information of how to apply, when by and what the recruitment process will be”
• Application Review – time in which for you to review the applicants that have applied for the job. All applicants should be reviewed by you and which ever team members you want to include e.g. the hiring manager or colleague that will be working closely with them. A lot of social ventures have found success in “blind recruitment” whereby you remove all personal information of the candidate from their application but leaves their cover letter, application form, skills, experience and/or interests. This will allow you to remove any unconscious bias from the decision-making process.
• Interviewing – in many ways this comes down to preference and there are numerous techniques you could adopt. Use techniques you’ve favoured in the past and don’t be afraid to change the interviewing process dependent on the position. Practical assessments are important for example if you are hiring someone to be a “coder” for a piece of technology you sell it is completely reasonable to test their coding ability. Rather than go into a lengthy section about interviewing I’d recommend speaking to advisors, colleagues and even google to identify what process will fit your organisation and that position the best.
• Offer – particularly for candidates actively searching for new positions, giving them the news of a job offer quickly is very important, after all they may be getting news from elsewhere in the meantime. When offering someone a job be clear about why you chose them, have a mind a time you’d like them to start and know how much you can pay, you should be the one to offer their starting salary and do check they are comfortable with this. In some circumstances there may be a reason to change the salary offer but most of the time it’s important to stick to the salary you’ve offered as this will be based off some sort of logic i.e. your budget limitations, the salary of employees in similar positions, salary progression rates, their skills, the jobs importance etc.
• Onboarding:
• this stage is crucial, really think about this process and how you could standardise it, especially if you are going to be doing a lot of recruitment in the future.
• Don’t overload people when they first start, little and often is the best approach and give them the opportunity to live and understand you values and mission.
• Don’t force a fit, if it’s not going to work out then be fair, not nice and let that person go. Obviously give them opportunities to learn and improve, but time bind it and stick to that plan!
• Probation (covered in the next stage)
• In short: involve others, understand who you want to hire, keep records of what you are doing, try blind recruitment and make your deadlines clear (and stick to them!) **Top Tips and Some Alternative Suggestions for **Performance Reviews, Probation and Team Management
• Job description should be reviewed quarterly over thematic areas with that employee, avoid a shopping list of skills and “to do’s” and try to make it relate to values if possible.
• Likewise think about “dynamic” job descriptions that can be altered in quarterly appraisals. Potentially following a format like the below:
• This gives you the opportunity to adapt the role to the needs of the business
• The “start-up CEO” suggests during the appraisal at the end of Q2 doing a test against values of the company to check how truly aligned that individual is with the organisation you are running. A useful synopsis of the book can be found here: https://tech.co/news/startup-ceo-matt-blumberg-2013-09
• During the probation period make sure you consider the following:
• Focus on areas of expertise/skills rather than roles/titles
• Individuals often like more than one function
• Agree decision making process for keeping them on or letting them go
• Check their compatibility and commitment to your mission
• Do they trust/value/respect you, their colleagues and the business
• If someone is hired in a more dynamic role, typical of ventures in the “setting the foundations” to “building to scale” stages, consider mapping their requirements (or even your whole businesses requirements) out in the following graph, this will help you establish what is business critical and what can wait:

| Typical Responsibilities   (not absolutely exclusive to either management or leadership) | Typical Responsibilities   (not absolutely exclusive to either management or leadership) | | --- | --- | | Management | Leadership | | Implementing tactical actions  Detailed budgeting  Measuring and reporting performance  Applying rules and policies  Implementing disciplinary rules  Organizing people and tasks within structures  Recruiting people for jobs  Checking and managing ethics and morals  Developing people  Problem-solving  Planning  Improving productivity and efficiency  Motivating and encouraging others  Delegating and training | Creating new visions and aims  Establishing organizational financial targets  Deciding what needs measuring and reporting  Making new rules and policies  Making disciplinary rules  Deciding structures, hierarchies and workgroups  Creating new job roles  Establishing ethical and moral positions  Developing the organization  Problem-anticipation  Visualising  Conceiving new opportunities  Inspiring and empowering others  Planning and organizing succession |

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Values - 4 Principles

Values have to be short. Your list of values is a collection of filters. A person who doesn’t meet a certain value is not someone you want to work with. Same thing with certain actions you want your employees to take. If you put too many filters, nobody will be able to get past all of them. The team gets stuck and they can’t grow. Values have to be memorable. People have to be able to remember them easily if they’re going to use them in everyday situations. It helps to make an acronym, like what Grammarly did, but you don’t have to. Make it punchy, make it memorable, and people will remember. Values have to align with the mission. If you’re going to promote desirable behaviour, make sure that behaviour is bringing you to your overall company goal. Values that don’t align with your mission are counter-productive and will frustrate employees or, even worse, make them indifferent. Values have to be stable. Consistent values encourage compliance, while inconsistent values confuse people and foster bad behaviour. The values are the bedrock principles upon which your team should base their actions, so if people are unsure about what to do, they will inevitably make the wrong decision.

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Downloadable Resources

• [Checklist for Hiring Staff](/leadership/assets/Checklist for Hiring Staff.pdf) PDF
• [Checklist for first time employers](/leadership/assets/Checklist for first-time employers.pdf) PDF
• [EDI Toolkit 140323](/leadership/assets/EDI Toolkit 140323.xlsx) Excel
• [Effective Team Working](/leadership/assets/Effective Team Working.png) Image
• FFTF HR checklist June19 PDF
• [Leadership Styles](/leadership/assets/Leadership Styles.jpg) Image
• [Netflix’s Values Presentation](/leadership/assets/Netflix’s Values Presentation.pdf) PDF
• Winter 2015 Whats Your Endgame PDF