Your team is the foundation of your management and the key that unlocks your success. They can power your greatness engine, or they can sink you into failure. Building your team is the single most crucial thing that you will do, and it can often be the hardest.
Adopt a mindset of high standards and make sure that the team knows them. Having clearly defined objectives is the best way to identify who is meeting these standards and who isn’t. These objectives will also help you outline development plans and measure each team member’s impact. Only the exceptional should retain their position on the team.
These are two common factors for teams who don’t get stuff done. Helping each team member get past these obstacles will move your team forward and solve the real issues facing your business.
1) Get them to grow up
One of the biggest weaknesses of a team is professional immaturity. These are the people who walk around exclaiming:
“She can, why can’t I?”
“It’s because they don’t like me.”
“I’m not in the popular club.”
“I don’t want to sit next to him because his hair is greasy.”
“That’s not my job.”
It is time to get your team off the school playground and onto the office floor. These are not the problems facing your business, but they are what will help your competition get ahead. Having a team focused on this kind of nonsense leads to constant bickering and atrocious performance. You must get your team to grow up because if you can’t, then you can’t get stuff done.
Simply redirecting these thought patterns will go a long way in maturing your team. Continuously bring the behaviors back to the expectations you have established. Rewarding positive and productive behaviors is the easiest way to eliminate the negative ones.
2) Getting along
The team needs to get along to the degree that they can be exceptional as a group. A team that cannot control their biases and gossip will struggle to get along. A team’s ability to get along is the rebar in its foundation.
The biggest contributor to a team that can’t get along is feeders. Feeders are the people who love to kick-start others. They plant poisonous seeds throughout the team and nurture them until they take root. Feeders purposefully put team members at odds with each other with their hateful and hurtful gossip. They like to be in the know, except what they know usually only exists in their head. Feeders are easy to spot; you have to open your eyes. Help the feeders modify their behavior by calling them out and redirecting them. If that fails, remove them.
Another way to help your team get along is to make sure they clearly understand their shared purpose. If the team doesn’t share a purpose, there isn’t much of an incentive to get along. Having a shared purpose keeps them focused on achieving the goals together. Help them understand the strengths of everyone on the team and how, without each individual contributor, the team cannot accomplish its mission. No one likes to fail, and if you link each person’s success with another, they start to come together. They will develop respect and, ultimately, loyalty to one another.
Once you’ve gotten them to grow up, focus on the real issues, and control their biases to get along, you can start to get things done. This is how you move your team forward and solve the real issues facing your business.
Last updated on October 15th, 2019 at 05:39 am
