Building and maintaining a successful consulting team

Creating a team is an ambitious task, creating a successful team that combines skills, experience, engagement and desire to constantly develop seems like an unachievable goal. I would like to share some ideas around this topic:

It is not job for everyone…

This is a comment of one of our team members shared in the employee survey that we organize on a regular basis at GAEU. Actually, we discussed this together and we believe that yes, EU grants consulting is a job for the right people on the right place. At GAEU, we are looking for candidates that:

Are unique

Their uniqueness may be expressed in either special knowledge that they possess or experience that they gathered during education or business opportunities. Our team members are specialists in different fields and graduated from the best universities in Europe. But it is not only knowledge that we are looking for, we search for people who have this constant desire to learn and willingness to broaden their knowledge. It is obvious that we work with so many different innovations and projects that having specialists dedicated to each case would not be possible. Their backgrounds with the  ability to learn quickly and willingness to explore new things gives the best results. Our clients are extremely happy to see how knowledgeable and experienced people we have within our team are.

Flexibility is the way of working   

Consulting business is influenced by the all the changes that are happening worldwide. Constant tractions in markets influence business and innovation world. Additionally, application programs are changing formats, requirements and templates frequently. This means that our employees need to have open minds and always see opportunities in new situations. Flexibility is closely connected to eagerness to learn new things, only those employees can be successful in our business. The greater experience of our consultants is, the less can surprise them in the future and they are more open to new programs and situations.

We are stronger together

We are convinced that each person from our team may be successful on the independent level. What we believe and try to build up is teamwork that leads us to the successes. Our perception is that  when you want constant and steady results you need to create a team that shares knowledge, supports each other and has awareness to provide feedback when needed. It is a not an easy process, but we believe that only integrated and solid team may succeed and react to the constant changes in consulting business. Extremely powerful tool is brainstorming meetings where we discuss and analyse changes. Everyone is contributing to shaping our processes and deciding how we create new  ways of working. Another tool is feedback: constructive feedback is something that we use in all aspects of our work: project deliveries, knowledge hub and ways of working are based on mutual and open feedback. In this way we find the best solutions for our business.

Feedback is important

We understand the importance of keeping our team engaged and motivated. It is crucial for us to have a well-functioning team rather than set of individuals with unique skills and knowledge. This is why the most powerful tool for us is to listen to our consultants needs and feedback.

We have our ways to give the floor to our employees: regular catch ups, 1 to 1 sessions regarding development, anonymous feedback about the engagement and projects gives us a lot of information on the mood, atmosphere, needs and supports shaping next actions for the team and individuals.

We let our employees  assess projects and environment they work with: we run employee surveys that gives us insight into what is happening within the team and how they assess curtail aspects of work for example: workload, environment and assignments. Discussions and building up actions upon feedback creates a cooperation of trust.

We create environment with  clear rules and standards, open communication and mutual understanding in different aspects.

On top of it, we simply have fun together. Integration event is something that we all know, but only truly engaged colleagues will enjoy this time together. We use not only standard ways to integrate people, like having  a team lunch or dinner, we implement actions like: sports challenges (running challenge), knowledge sessions ( sharing unique knowledge and skills), or buddy role (having a dedicated support person during your induction period).

Our goal is to win not to deliver

It may sound like an obvious thing, but we search for people who like to win. Our team consists of consultants that will do everything to use their combined skills  and resources to deliver the best possible outcome for our Clients. We search for people who want to exceed our clients expectations. We create an environment where successes and our results determine all our actions as an organization.

Joanna Szepelak-Frydrych, MSc, Operations Manager, Partner