Posts Tagged ‘team’

Leaders’ priority is to deliver results.  When leaders deliver results they create success for the organisation’s they lead which leads to more personal success.  While leaders deliver results those leaders that are truly successful recognise that creating and building teams are critical to their success.   So why are teams so critical to your success as a leader?

Only one of you

As a leader you are probably extremely good at what you do and highly capable.  After all you would not have achieved the success you have so far unless you were good.  That said, there is only one of you and you have finite amount of time.  24 hours a day, 168 hours in a week, and 744 hours in a month is what you have no matter how great a leader you are.  With this limit in time, there is a limit on what you can get done on your own.

Skills, knowledge, experience and expertise

Teams bring a much greater of range skills, knowledge, experience and expertise than any one leader could ever have.  Think about it.  Every Managing Director or CEO started out their business career in a particular discipline.  It might have been marketing, sales, finance, operations or human resources to name just a few.  They started out experts and became generalists and more rounded.  At the same time they recognise that they can never be experts in every area of business so they build teams with complimentary skills, knowledge, experience and expertise.

Creativity

You might be a highly creative person. Imagine having 5 or 10 other creative people contributing ideas, knowledge and enthusiasm into creating a compelling vision for the organisation.  How much richer would the final product or output be in this situation?  Leaders who achieve success know that much more can be created through teams working together than working on their own.

So teams maximise the possibilities and achievements but what can leaders do to leverage the benefits of teams and achieve success:

1. Know what you are brilliant at

2. Be aware of the gaps in your skills, knowledge, experience and expertise

3. Make sure that your teams are full of people with complimentary skills, knowledge, experience and expertise

4. Make recruitment a priority area in your business so that you attract and recruit the best people

Bottom line – The best leaders know that teams are critical to their success.  So what steps are you going to take to be an even more successful leader?

A team as a collective can deliver much greater results than any one individual could.  A key component in any team is the leadership of the team.  So what are my 7 key tips when it comes to leading teams?

Tip 1:  Have a clear vision

If you don’t know where you are heading, how will you know when you have got to the destination?  Put differently, it is essential that you create a clear vision of what you want the team to achieve so that it can be understood by everyone.

Tip 2: Learn to be a great listener

You are the leader and have many ideas, views, opinions and solutions.  Your team know that this but also want to be able to offer their views and feel like they have been heard. A good leader recognises this and focuses most of their communication on listening.

Tip 3:  Be someone who takes decisions

As a leader you need to weigh up the upside and downside of any particular option and then decide.  Team members may not always support your decisions 100% or may not have taken the exactly the same decision.  On they other hand they will respect you for not procrastinating.

Tip 4:  Empower your team 

One of the big advantages of a team is the range and variety of skills and experience that is available.  You know what you are good at and not so good at, so empower those to do what they do best.

Tip 5:  Encourage participation

In any team there will be those who are vocal and those who will be quieter.  Your role as a leader is to encourage the full range of contributions and encourage the introverts who make great contributions to get their point across.

Tip 6: Be a role model

One of the best ways to show how you want others to act, behave and interact is to show them.  By being a role model you encourage others to follow your lead.

Tip 7:  Know your team limits

Within any team there will be a range of skills and abilities.  If you are to lead effectively you need to understand the limits of all team members.

Bottom Line – Leading a team is a challenge but by doing some simple things you can become a highly effective team leader.  So what’s your first step in becoming a highly effective team leader?

One of the great benefits of a team is the range of skills, knowledge, experience and personal attributes that they can draw on to address a problem or issue.  On the other hand, the full potential of this diverse range of expertise is often not fully exploited.  This might be due to one or more of the following factors:

• People don’t fully appreciate what others are good at

• People make assumptions about what people can or cannot do rather than finding out

• People think and maybe even believe that they are masters at everything

• People don’t like acknowledging that they are not great at some things for fear of losing face or worrying how it will change others perceptions of them

As the leader of the team your job is to make sure that you get each and every one of your team members performing at their optimal level, so take the time and make the effort to discover and exploit the strengths of your team members.

When leading workshops, training or speaking about teams, I often get people to think about what the key characteristics are of the best teams.

Without exception, having a common goal is one of the first things that people tend to highlight. So why are goals seen as so powerful when it comes to team working?

Firstly a goal gives everyone a clear and specific outcome to aim for.  The team knows what is trying to deliver and has a clear direction of travel.

Secondly, delivering the goal, especially if it is going to make a big difference to a number of stakeholders becomes a huge desire for those in the team.  This desire drives the team on, even when things are tough.

Thirdly a common goal breaks down the barriers of which function or specialism people work in and shifts the attention to delivering the result.

We all know that teams have huge potential to deliver great results.  How has the existence or lack of a goal impacted on the results your team delivers?

Highly effective teams can achieve extraordinary results for the organisations that they serve.  Achieving success for the organisation leads to greater personal success, and achievement.  Yet in truth, team success is not guaranteed.  So what are 5 common barriers to team success and what can you do to avoid them?

Barrier 1: Fuzzy outcomes

If a team is to prosper and deliver results, it needs to be crystal clear about the results or outcomes that are expected to be delivered by the team.  Too often teams are set outcomes that are fuzzy and vague which unsurprisingly leads to little in terms of results.  Make the outcomes specific and measurable.  For example, reduce waste from product X by 10% by 31 December 2008 is both specific and measurable.

Barrier 2: Unproductive conflict

All successful teams need to have challenge and conflict otherwise it all becomes too cosy.  On the other hand, it is important to ensure that conflict is productive rather than destructive or unproductive.  Lively and heated debate that actually results in a better outcome or solution is an example of productive conflict.  Challenge that focuses on all of the negatives without offering any alternatives is unproductive.

Barrier 3: Playing it safe

Making a step change in performance or turning things round requires teams and team members to take some risk and step out of their comfort zone.  This will only happen if the culture within the organisation supports and rewards this type of innovative and balanced risk taking approach.  For example, if the culture is to look for scapegoats when things go wrong, people will keep within the safety boundaries rather than taking a chance.

Barrier 4: Individual agendas

If a team is to prosper, all members need to sign up to and be committed to the team goals first foremost.  For many this is particularly challenging as in business, we are used to being concerned about our own individual situation.  Creating a reward system that relies on the group can be a useful stepping stone to encouraging teams to focus on the team agenda.

Barrier 5: Leadership

In teams someone has to take on the role of the leader.  A team without a leader is like a ship without a captain.  The team might select a leader or as the team develops someone may emerge who is the natural leader.  However, any successful team needs a leader.

Bottom Line – Teams can achieve great results but it is essential that the barriers to team success are identified and addressed.  So what barriers are getting in the way of your teams success?

Teams exist to deliver results and when they do it well they deliver much more than any one of us could do individually.  Pillars are the foundations that contribute to success and include:

1. Having a common purpose or goal
2. High levels of trust
3. Good communication
4. Positiveness
5. Proactiveness
6. Strong results focus

To learn more about leading and managing successful team, check out this free audio masterclass

We all have experienced times when we were part of a great team and there are other times when we struggle along in isolation.  In my experience there are 6 main benefits of team working:

1. More creativity leading to more ideas and better results
2. Increased employee satisfaction
3. The opportunity to develop and acquire new skills
4. The speed at which things can be achieved
5. A sounding board for testing out ideas and thoughts
6. A support network that you can draw on

What do you consider to be some of the additional benefits of team working?

For the exhaustive reference on working with, leading and managing teams, check out the special pre-release on my latest book. If you are serious about your team, don’t miss this special Click here for more details