{"id":3022,"date":"2024-12-11T15:23:28","date_gmt":"2024-12-11T22:23:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canopyadvisory.com\/?p=3022"},"modified":"2025-10-15T16:09:17","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T22:09:17","slug":"what-does-the-best-version-of-your-team-look-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canopyadvisory.com\/what-does-the-best-version-of-your-team-look-like\/","title":{"rendered":"What Does the Best Version of Your Team Look Like?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s a deceptively simple question that every business leader should be asking themselves at least every year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As leaders and owners, we often have a clear vision of our strategy, where we want to be as a business and even a broad roadmap for how to get there. In some cases, our vision for what our team should look like is less distinct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are numerous reasons for this discrepancy, one of which is how little time most leaders truly have to consider future strategy. From the outside looking in, a person might think that a leader or owner would spend a third or even half of their time planning ahead. In its most recent study on the topic, Harvard Business Review noted that CEOs spend an average of 21.5% of their time on strategy<\/a>. In a recent Forbes article<\/a>, executives were encouraged to spend at least 12.5% of their workweeks on strategy. In my experience, the percentage of time most people spend on mapping out the future is much lower.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more pressing issue I see in how teams are built is how easy it is to fall into the trap of short-termism in hiring and staffing. It\u2019s hard to blame leaders for this, as they\u2019re as responsible for the effectiveness, productivity and cohesion of the team in the short-term as they are in the future. The decision to focus too heavily on the makeup of the team today and in the near future, however, can hamstring leaders in the future by limiting agility and forcing turbulent and trust-eroding actions like layoffs and furloughs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other difficult part about identifying short-termism is that it\u2019s often a result of asking the right, or at least extremely valid, questions about your team:<\/p>\n\n\n\n