We’ve released a lot of OA leadership guides in the past, showing you how to direct your people and lead your teams to success. But we’ve never shown you how to actually build a team. That’s what this guide is all about – finding the right people for the job and assembling them into a cohesive unit.

Before you can start assembling your team, you must understand the nature of your objective. Only when you have a clear vision of your task can you select the right people to join your tribe.

Understanding your mission isn’t the same thing as making a plan. When assembling a team, you don’t need to have an exact idea of how you will accomplish your objective. But you need an accurate concept of what your goal is, and the general tasks your mission will require (eg. if you’re capturing an enemy compound, you don’t need a fleshed-out game plan. But you should reasonably expect to encounter resistance).

Once you know the nature of your mission, you must determine what kind of leader you’ll be. By this, we mean determining which type of leadership style is best suited to accomplishing the objective. In general, the more disorderly and chaotic the task, the more autocratic and strict you must be as a leader. Conversely, if your mission is well-defined and relatively calm, you can be more collaborative and friendly in your approach. 

Why is it crucial to determine your leadership style when selecting a team, you ask? Because how you plan on managing your mission makes a direct impact on the types of people you’ll choose for your squad. The details and nuances behind determining your leadership style can get complicated. That’s why we created an entire OA guide to help you out! Click this link to read about The 7 Styles of Leadership and find out which you should use.

You understand your mission and how to conduct yourself as a leader. Now, It’s finally time to assemble your team. When it comes down to picking the ideal individuals for your squad, don’t think of it as choosing teammates – think of it as selecting your personal special forces unit. What do we mean by this? Your people must have the same three characteristics as a SOF operator:

• Specialized: Special forces operators aren’t jacks of all trades. They have a job, and they’re deadly at what they do. Snipers are experts at sniping, combat engineers are experts at combat engineering, and medics are experts at field medicine. Your people must be the same way.
  
  Look at your mission and determine the key skills you’ll need to accomplish the objective. If you need someone good with computers, pick the most specialized expert you can find.
  
  
• Capable: Knowledge doesn’t mean anything if you can’t apply it. The same goes for your teammates. Picking capable people means choosing individuals who have what it takes to execute under pressure, overcome obstacles, and persevere through difficulty. 
  
  
• Adaptable: Adaptability is the most crucial aspect of choosing the right people for your squad. If your teammates can't think outside the box and adapt to changing situations, they’ll be next to useless on a mission.
  
  Operations rarely ever go to plan. Somewhere along the way, you’re bound to run into some unexpected obstacle. When that happens, your people must be intelligent, confident, and skilled enough to improvise and adapt to the new scenario. One-dimensional people will cause your mission to fail.

If you want to achieve your SOF goals, you must find your tribe. You must find a group of people who will push you to improve and perform day in, day out. Unfortunately, it can be nearly impossible to find the right team of motivated people. That’s why we created the Operators Association. When you become an Aspiring Operator, you get instant access to our community of hundreds of driven future, current, and former SOF operators who will guide you on the path. You also get many other perks like exclusive OA podcasts, a weekly accountability group with special forces cadre, and complimentary invites to Operators Association events! Click here to join OA now.