I was recently talking with a client who was agitated that she had just made a bad hire. It wasn’t that this new person was inexperienced or unskilled; he was smart and capable, just as had shown up in the interview. But he was quickly proving to be a lousy teammate – ego-driven, secretive, selfish and unproductively competitive.

Great teams are built intentionally. People often think that the best teams come together by some combination of good luck and good timing, but the truth is a much more deliberate story. We studied thousands of teams in dozens of industries and found that the highest performing teams always had similar traits and characteristics. The individuals on these teams chose to be great team players.

• 47 times more likely to work hard to build and maintain trust
• 50 times more likely to openly discuss conflict when it arose
• 55 times more likely to have very well defined goals for the team
• 106 times more likely to give each other tough feedback

We call the best teams “Loyalist Teams,” because on them, every team member is loyal to one another, the team goals, and the organizational goals. Individuals work to ensure each other’s success as much as they work to ensure their own. High-performance teams create operating norms that explain how members of the team will treat each other. And team members hold each other accountable to maintain those norms.

When it comes to adding a new person to the crew, these teams make decisions just as deliberately. Like all teams, they hire for experience and skill but they also pay the same attention to cultural fit. Hiring for culture fit saves pain that comes down the road when the wrong candidate comes on board.  Here are a few tips for ensuring your new hire is the right fit for your Loyalist Team.

• Include team members in the interview process.

To ensure a great fit, invite your team into the selection process. Get clear ahead of time on what “right fit” means and give your team accountability for deciding who is the best fit for your team’s chemistry.

• Share the team’s operating norms. 

Setting expectations for team behaviors before a candidate is hired gives them a chance to opt out. There’s no harm in them thinking, Thanks for the interview but this team is not for me. It’s better to know this before they land on your team.

• Probe for a Loyalist Team mindset.

Asking open-ended questions can get at a candidate’s beliefs about teams.  For example: Tell me about a time a teammate let you down and how you handled it? Or, Talk about your best and worst team experiences. Or,Share a time when you were a part of a team that was struggling to perform. What role did you play and how did you handle it?

• Listen for “I” versus “we.” 

One clue about a candidate’s mindset will come through how they talk about their team experiences. All “I” responses may be a red flag.

• Don’t settle. 

Trauma for both the team and the new-hire can be avoided by taking the time to get the best person on board. The odds of remediating a wrong-fit candidate are low. At best, you may spend a lot time integrating a skeptical new hire with your Loyalist Team practices.

All team members are responsible for the team culture so it’s important to find the right person and, once they’re on board, to help them adjust and learn the rules of the road. Every aspect of building and maintaining a great team has to be done thoughtfully and with great intention. Same for hiring. And if it’s done right, there are no surprises and the new lineup will be able to continue creating the same extraordinary results as the original line up.

Door-to-door marketing is a canvassing technique that is generally used for sales, marketing, advertising, or campaigning, in which the person or persons walk from the door of one house to the door of another, trying to sell or advertise a product or service to the general public or gather information. People who use this sales approach are often called traveling salesmen, or the archaic name drummer, to “drum up” business. This technique is also sometimes called direct sales. A variant of this involves cold calling first, when another sales representative attempts to gain agreement that a salesperson should visit.

With the realization of telephone “Do Not Call” lists it is becoming increasingly more difficult to connect with consumers and business people. An emerging trend is the deployment of very professional, highly skilled door-to-door canvassers to drive product sales and brand awareness.

Coordinating, training and motivating these teams to produce results are at the very core of Fulcrum’s proven capabilities. Fulcrum has the knowledge and experience required to implement these programs, such as best days and times to canvass, who will sell the most product; male, female, young or mature and what geographics and demographics respond best to door-to-door marketing. Put Fulcrum’s experience to work for you and avoid the costly mistakes of trying to manage these programs in-house.

Hire and Train Door-to-Door Marketing Team

If you’re in charge of hiring people, that typically means that you’ve found success in Door To Door Marketing yourself. You know what it takes to be great, but now you’re stuck with an entirely new problem. How do you find others who will be just as good (if not better) and will stick around and grow into important influencers invested in the long term growth of the company? A great D2D sales company is a great recruiting company. So what does that greatness look like?

First off, you need to realize that you’re not going to hire a superstar every time. If you think you have found one, be careful. It’s not hard for someone to seem golden during one interview and you don’t want to be fooled.

Even if you think the candidate does have a lot of great experience working in the field for other companies, you have to realize that success doesn’t always translate. What worked for them at previous companies probably won’t work as well for you. In fact, their success will probably make them stubborn; after all, what reason do they have to follow your approach when they’ve figured out their own?

It’s also possible that the rep’s previous company might have had much better-developed training and selling systems than you do, and that system was the key reason they killed it. If you’re not developing a competitive system, what does that communicate about your company? The more dialed-in you are about a rep’s success, the more likely you are to attract and keep strong performers.