How to Select the Best Team for Your Wedding Party

Apr 2018

It’s hard to imagine your wedding day without your best friends and family by your side. Selecting your favorites and appointing them as wedding party members is one way to include those special people on your special day. Today’s post will be your go-to guide on how to select who will be up close and personal as you say I do!

So, What’s the First Step?

Step one is to get that fat rock on your finger. Might seem obvious but I can’t tell you how many friends I have that have already planned the intimate details of their hypothetical ‘weddings’ without even being in a committed relationship! I won’t name names here but you know who you are…

Assuming you’re already engaged, hallelujah, and ready to begin putting together your ‘bridal dream team’, let us look to business for a few lessons.

What Business Can Teach You About Selecting Your Bridal Party

Successful and innovative companies generally have high performing teams responsible for any number of important initiatives. Teams of people support projects such as mergers and acquisitions, new construction or product development to name a few. As the old saying goes, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’ Further, teams:

Generate a wide range of ideas

Can bounce ideas off each other

Feel empowered and often take more risks than individuals

Support each other

Create the right balance of skills necessary to achieve high performance

High-performance teams share a common vision, goals, metrics; they collaborate and hold each other accountable for achieving outstanding results. When constructing a team, you must consider the following:

Purpose of the team – why create a team in the first place?

The number of team members – what is the optimal number?

Types of team members needed based on roles – what functions does each need to perform?

Team composition – who has the necessary skills to fulfill each role? how will they work together?

Objectives for the team – what is expected of the team?

How Does All That Relate To Your Bridesmaids and Groomsmen?

When putting together your group of bridesmaids and groomsmen, you can think of it as putting together a ‘wedding team’ or wedding party and use many of the considerations we discussed above in the world of business.

For the bridal party, the maid of honor and best man are like your quarterbacks or team leaders and thus should be your first appointments. They will be the ones helping plan your ever-important bachelor and bachelorette parties. They will also be helping make sure things go as planned on the day of and delivering a very important speech at your reception.

Think of these two as your first round picks. For some, siblings will automatically fill these roles and for others, it’ll be those ‘day one’ kinds of friends. In some respect, these folks set the tone for the rest of your motley crew.

To continue building your high-performance bridal party, select people that you can count on and that you won’t need to tend to on your special day. Further, select people that you won’t need to worry about around your family members; i.e. there is a lush in every friend group – so don’t say I didn’t warn you when said lush gets crazy with your out of town family!

Let’s Talk Obligations

I’ll just go ahead and say it; in my opinion, you should always include your brothers, sisters, future brothers-in-law and future sisters-in-law. I’m rather traditional when it comes to this wedding custom and believe a wedding is a merger of more than just a bride and groom, but also of their families. Hopefully, you are close to those relatives but if not there is no time like the present.

Keep in mind that you can always include younger family members by having them escort guests or pass out programs before the ceremonies. In addition, if you have especially cute toddlers as relatives, consider them for the ever-important flower girl or ring bearer positions. People love that shit.

How Many Bridesmaids and Groomsmen Should You Have?

In my opinion, you should have any many as your little heart desires. Some say it should be proportional to the number of guests that will be attending; like if you have a small 50 person wedding, 8 bridesmaids and 8 groomsmen seems a bit extreme. Like in business, you would not assemble a 6-person team to plan a luncheon for 18 people.

What Else Should I Know?

You don’t have to ask friends to be bridesmaids or groomsmen just because they asked you. It is nice to reciprocate the gesture but honestly, this day is about you, and if these people are true friends they won’t mind in the long run.

Team building activities are important for business teams but are also vital for your bridal parties. Bachelorette and bachelor parties can do just the trick! It’s amazing how a quickly a group of people can bond over a few days of drinking and debauchery.

A tool that you can use to plan events, such as bachelorette, parties is the checklist, it is a simple tool that ensures that you don’t forget any important details!

Clarifying roles and responsibilities for those in your wedding party is also imperative. See my post from last week for more information on roles and responsibilities and how you can determine who does what. Obviously, you will have named your maid of honor and best man but fear not, you can still assign other duties to your other noble team members.

To help with these determine whom you would like to work with you on planning the events, shop for the attire and attend all of the pre-wedding events; i.e. engagement party, shower, rehearsal, etc. Consider your wedding party members’ strength and weaknesses. Do not expect your virgin cousin Jane to come through on the bachelorette party penis favors.

What is the Most Important Piece of Advice?

Maybe the most important thing to remember is that (hopefully) you’ll only be assembling this wedding party dream team once so make sure they are who you’d pick 10, 20, 50 years from now. Historically, the divorce rate in the US stands somewhere around 50% so we can be pretty sure that only half of you will be re-picking teams; may the odds be ever in your favor.

Use it Or Lose It:

When creating a team, determine:

The purpose of the team – why create a team in the first place?

The number of team members – what is the optimal number?

Types of team members needed based on roles – what functions does each need to perform?

Team composition – who has the necessary skills to fulfill each role? how will they work together?

Objectives for the team – what is expected of the team?

Some specific pieces of advice when choosing your wedding party:

Only select those people who are truly special to you

The size of your wedding party is up to you, it’s your day so do what makes you happy

Pick like you’re only picking once

Include your family members

Think about what each member of the wedding party brings to the table

When To Use It:

The focus of this post was centered on putting together an all-star bridal party but these same guidelines can apply to any team. Consider them when putting together any of the following teams:

Sport and Social teams

Teams in school/college

Project teams

Work teams

Groups of friends

Thankfully, I have an amazing group of girlfriends, a truly wonderful sister-in-law, the sweetest cousin and a fantastic sister-in-law to be so my job was easy! My maid of honor and group of 5 additional bridesmaids are planning my bachelorette to take place this August in Cuba… stay tuned!

Hopefully, you’ll only need to pick this team once and keep priming that Pump!

Xoxo Bri

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