How Do You Choose Your MLM Team?

Has anyone given you the advice in MLM, "choose your team wisely?" In a traditional job, unless you are at the very top of the company you don't always get to choose who you work with. Even if you are at the top, you would delegate some hiring authority and eventually end up with some people you might not like, right?In MLM, we build our team by choosing who we want to work with. So what qualities do you want in the people who join your MLM team? How does this differ from the qualities you might seek when hiring someone in a traditional workforce job?Here is what I like to see in new MLM partners:
Motivated
Self-starting
Coachable
Dependable
Hard-working
Positive
Optimistic
Creative
Leadership potential
How does this differ from what we look for in traditional employees? I would say, in almost any job you would like your employees to be motivated, dependable, and hard-working. That's pretty much a given.In some traditional jobs, being self-starting and/or creative is actually not a good thing! Certain jobs must be done exactly the same way every time. You can't "take a stab at it" and get some practice, or come up with your own way of doing it. Yet in MLM these traits are necessary to an extent! If you are going to work from home, you must be able to get started and stay motivated without constant supervision. Being creative, within certain bounds of being coachable, is also necessary. I love Napoleon Hill's description in "Think And Grow Rich" of the two types of creative thinking.Coachable is very important in both MLM and traditional work, especially for someone new. However, in MLM it is important that the person recognizes who they should listen to! There are many people offering to coach. You don't want someone who simply does everything that anyone tells them to do. When you get new team members in MLM, you want to teach them how to think, not what to think. You want them to become critical thinkers, so they will listen to the right people, and ignore the people who aren't capable of helping them. The reason being coachable is so important in MLM, is that MLM is different from the traditional corporate world. Some skills carry over, but new skills need to be developed as well. It is not exactly the same as owning your own traditional business or franchise, either.A good example of combining coachable, creative and self-starting is article writing! If a new team member wants to promote themselves by writing articles, they need some coaching on how to do it. But with that direction, they need to be creative enough to find ideas to write about and self-starting enough to go get it done.In traditional jobs, there are certain positions that can't be done for very long by people with true leadership potential. They will get frustrated by always being the follower and taking orders. In some companies, everyone starts at "the bottom" so they understand the whole system, but those with leadership potential are recognized and promoted. In MLM, you really want everyone to be a potential leader. After all, everyone "owns" their own distributorship and builds their own team. Of course, some will not rise to the occasion. But you certainly want to look for those traits, and attempt to develop them. Tom Schreiter has a great free email mini-course on finding and developing leaders available through his website.I think the biggest mistake people making when getting started in MLM, is not finding the right people to mentor them. The right mentor, and mastermind group, can teach you how to build the best team!