Building Teams: An Ever-Evolving Orchestra

Wonderland is moving fast, and to assist in this speed we’re working hard to build a team of high performers with perfect harmony. By this we don’t just mean the delivery of excellent work and outsized results, but also hiring team members who align with our mission and are driven and motivated to help us achieve our goals.

At Wonderland we like to build our teams around the talents, backgrounds and skills people have, and what they can bring to the table. To our eyes, every person’s individual skills and talents contribute to the success of the team, but so do their personality and personal culture. 

For us, it’s critically important that the people we hire are 1000% aligned with those that they work with - as we spend the majority of our week days together - and with our values. We need people who are constantly striving to raise the bar and bring endless positivity to our team, who can be trusted with freedom and flexibility in their working life and who join the team with a founder mentality. Through this, we’re able to build strong teams based on mutual respect and alignment; for us this is simply non-negotiable.

When I was younger, I played in one of the country’s top hockey teams, eventually rising to be ranked second in the Netherlands. If you look at that team as a group of individuals, we weren’t the best. But through our managers ability to inspire and motivate us, and to mould our individual skills and talents into a cohesive unit, we became a top performing team. He made sure the vibe was good and that we understood each other well, and he looked at our talents as individuals to discover where our strengths lay as a small part of a greater whole.

Did we train hard? Shit yes. 
Did we have fun? Shit yes. 
Did I come out with some of the best friends I could have hoped for? SHIT YES! 

We celebrated successes and supported each other in failures, and along the way we made great memories and learned lessons that have translated and carried across into our professional lives. 

As a manager, it’s your responsibility to create these memories with your team, to support and encourage them, lift them up and push them. Reverse engineer what memory you would like to achieve with your team and see what kind of team and individual people you end up with to achieve this.

In the end, you can think of it like building a smooth swinging jazz ensemble, where each individual person plays a different instrument and contributes to an epic outcome. If you find the right people with the right instruments, you’ll build a great sound that people will love.

More on this to come.