We spoke to Shine for Women founder Caroline Whaley. Caroline spent 14 years at Nike, where she led creative development of the Nike Foundation.Since then, as the co-founder of Shine4women, Caroline has worked with 10,000 women across 75 nationalities, empowering them to lead the change they want to see.

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With a career spanning decades of building teams, Caroline gave us some inspiring food for thought to consider when building a powerhouse team.

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Check out the full conversation on LinkedIn, and read on for our top takeaways:

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⚡Establishing non-negotiable qualities in your search…

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In order to find the right fit for your team, establishing the right qualities to look for in a candidate is a must. For Caroline, with every new person joining her team, she looks out for two qualities beyond the specifications of the job; curiosity and a non-judgemental attitude.

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Caroline also encourages founders to recruit around energy. In the early stages, founders are often bogged down with a myriad of tasks. It can be overwhelming trying to do everything, especially without an extensive budget to spread the workload. And so finding someone with the right approach to work and flexibility to grow with you and your business is paramount.

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Fundamentally, a new recruit with the right energy can help to challenge your approach to work and act as allies in your scale up journey.

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⚡Finding strengths in diversity…

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In Shine for Women’s early stages, Caroline reached out to contacts that she had previously worked with while building teams at the Nike Foundation. In the process of forming the team, many of her contacts she had brought on board had very different professional backgrounds, with some having worked in the commercial sector at Nike and some coming from the public sector having worked in international development.

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This was a worthy challenge to her leadership skills as it meant ensuring that the different personalities could work best together and inspire each other. However, despite struggling with the initial adjustment, Caroline found that different backgrounds meant they could benefit from diversity in the ideas they were able to generate, but also a wide range of expertise to pull from meant that people were able to have honest conversations where they could challenge one another in a constructive and enabling manner.

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Additionally, Caroline embraces the diversity within her team even during the recruitment process, getting different people within the business to interview candidates. This way, there’s a range of people interacting with candidates, which ultimately helps get an idea of the potential dynamic that could form with a new recruit, something Caroline is intentional on prioritising.

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⚡Mistakes are inevitable…

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Something Caroline has realised through her experience in building various teams is that there isn’t a blueprint for a perfect team. Teams are a dynamic situation and it’s often difficult to get it right with every hire, let alone on your first attempts.

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People will come and go as your business develops. Team building is not a perfect science, given that the only real way to find the right fit is to simply bring new people in and gain a sensibility of how they work.

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But Caroline encourages founders to make decisions quickly when moving forward from making the wrong hire. One mistake she wishes she didn’t make was in holding on to new hires that had the right skills for the job but the wrong energy and vision. She felt she couldn’t lose their expertise, but in hindsight, their ability to align with the future vision of the business was the fundamental problem that needed to be solved but couldn’t be changed if they weren’t willing.

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Caroline’s parting advice for all founders is to look for people who will align with your vision. Making sure you surround yourself with genuine allies who support you and give you energy and bring skill sets that you might not have to bring the best out of everyone.

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What lessons will you be adopting when making your next hire? I’d love to know.

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Lucy 👋

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PS: To find out more about Shine4Women, visit their website here.

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