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Recruiting a team
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in practice
A team with the right mix of skills and experience will
bring insights and fresh thinking to difficult strategic issues. A roughly
equal mix of experts and non-experts, insiders and outsiders works well in
ensuring the right balance of focused analysis and imagination.
Key issues to consider when recruiting a team
include:
- team size
- team skills
- the team leader
- the recruitment process
- stakeholder engagement.
Team Size
The size of the team is important
- it should be large enough to encourage a mix of backgrounds and
skills but small enough for each person to be a crucial part of the
team. Relatively small teams established especially for the project
tend to arrive at better solutions than single individuals or large
legacy teams. In a large group, people may tend to go along with
popular opinion rather than thinking for themselves. In general, the
larger the group of people, the harder it is for the group to work
well together. Smaller numbers also make team administrative tasks
easier and make it easier to develop a common purpose with mutual
goals and mutual accountability.
The size and composition of the team is likely to vary over the
length of the project, as different phases of work will require
different levels of resources and different skills.
Team Skills
A multi-disciplinary team with the right mix of skills
and experience will bring insights and fresh thinking to difficult
strategic issues and will provide a secure foundation for successful
policy analysis, design and implementation. Considering the appropriate
split between civil servants and non-civil servants and between experts
and non-experts will help to secure the right combination of knowledge and
freshness. End dates of any secondments should be made as flexible as
possible to allow for delays in publication or securing collective
agreement to the project's recommendations. Team leaders also need to be
aware of and manage demands on team members who are not full-time on the
project.
Before beginning the recruitment process, a team
leader may draw up job profiles to help identify the breadth of skills and
experience needed in the new team which is likely to include:
- specific domain knowledge or expertise in certain subject
areas
- general analytical and conceptual ability
- specialist statistical and economics skills
- decision-making skills and project management experience
- interpersonal skills
- creativity skills
- delivery experience.
The Team Leader
The role of the team leader is to lead the people and
manage the resources of the team to meet the project's goals. It is the
team
leader's responsibilities include:
- Keep the purpose, goals and process meaningful through effective
project management
- Monitor the performance of the team
- Build commitment and confidence in the team members
- With support, manage the public face of the project e.g. media
- Establish constructive links with other units, departments and with
external stakeholders
- Create opportunities for team members and make effective use of
their skills and experience
- Inspire, lead, coach and develop
- As appropriate, take on responsibility for producing specific pieces
of work.
The Recruitment Process
To enable the project to commence quickly, it is
helpful to have identified potential candidates well before the project
gets the green light. Without this, the momentum behind the project can
dissipate before it has even got off the ground. One way to facilitate
this is to have a database of candidates who have already passed the
interview process. The team leader can then trawl through the database to
identify suitable candidates to contact.
If team members are to be recruited from scratch, there
is the critical question of who chooses the team. It is important that the
team leader is given the final decision over this and is able to interview
and reject candidates. This will avoid the awkward situation whereby the
team leader is allocated team members that others are trying to get rid
off - an unfortunate, but surprisingly common, scenario.
It is important to manage the workload of any internal
candidates for the team, by ensuring that real time is made available and
that the project will not simply add to existing workload. This can be
aided by identifying the part of their current workload that will be
removed.
Stakeholder Engagement
When putting together a team, it is important to
consider whether stakeholder
interests should be
represented. It is desirable to bring into the team people from
organisations and other government Departments with a major interest in
the subject area (for example practitioners, academics and other civil
servants) in order for the work to benefit from their perspective and to
encourage a more inclusive process. This will also be of benefit during
the subsequent implementation of recommendations arising from the project,
particularly if team members are likely to be involved in implementation
themselves.
Issues for consideration should include:
- Does the individual in question have specific skills or knowledge
that will allow them to make a genuine contribution to the team, or
could the same knowledge be gained without having them on the team?
- Will the presence of a representative from one stakeholder distort
the project in any way (i.e. by making other stakeholders feel
ignored, or by appearing to prejudice the outcome)?
- Is the individual available on a full or part time basis?
In many cases an individual with expert knowledge of
the issues and the key institutions can be a very valuable team member,
adding credibility to the overall project. But this should be carefully
assessed when putting together the team structure.
Strengths
- Taking time to recruit the right team, with the optimum mix of skills,
expertise and freshness is crucial to the success of the project.
Weaknesses
- The team leader is often constrained in choice of team members by
budget considerations and availability of staff.
Recruiting a team
In Practice: SU GM Crops & Disability Projects
The clear lesson from both the GM Crops
and Disability projects is that team recruitment needs to be an integral
part of project planning. The skills, backgrounds and experiences of all
the team members - especially the team leader - will play a major part
in determining the success of the project and the tone / content of any
outputs.
In the GM Crops project, the SU
identified early on that the project team would need to be seen as
objective, with no pre-conceived positions on the many controversies
arising from the GM debate. For this reason, the SU deliberately recruited
a team containing no experts on GM issues, recognising that there was no
such thing as an expert perceived as "neutral" by all sides.
However, the SU ensured that the team members contained the right set of
skills and experience - economic, scientific and policy development -
which would need to be brought to bear in the project.
The SU adopted a somewhat different approach in
recruiting the team for the work on Disability. Drawing on an early draft
of the project's terms of reference and workstream structures, a list of
essential and desirable team skills was identified. This was then matched
against a list of known candidates, drawn from inside and outside the SU.
Where candidates possessed the right skills for the project, interviews
were held, led by the team leader. Where gaps were identified in the
necessary skills mix, new candidates were identified through contacts
across Government and elsewhere. At all times, the overall balance of the
team was of paramount importance - as was the need to include experts
from inside and outside Government. Although this thorough process proved
to be time-consuming (as much as 12-14 weeks from initial identification
of skills to arrival of the final team member), it was essential in
creating the right team for the project.
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