Working your team

When you look at your team remember to think about two things:

1. No one is ever given a perfect team
2. You now have a collection of intellects and talent to use to solve your business problems

An important leadership truth: you get the team you were given, but after a time, you end up with the team you deserve.

How you treat the people given to you and the results they achieve are a direct reflection of the value you bring as a leader.

In order to build the team you deserve, begin by establishing the strengths, weaknesses and a CV for everyone on your team.

(Don’t become side tracked judging whether individuals are good or bad, or whether you would of hired them or not. This is generally unproductive unless you want the sum of your labour to be calculated in the quality of the excuse you can develop for not performing.)

Get to know your team, learn about their personal motivations and circumstances (whole people come to work no one can leave their personal circumstances outside of the office) Once you have learned enough about the individuals, think carefully about how to use this unique set of skills, experience and aptitudes.

It is vital that you help your team appreciate each individual member. Blaming, name calling, isolating and forming cliques are all behaviour's that reduce team effectiveness. Whereas inclusion, respect and adherence to values drive team performance.

Each time you come to a business problem where the answer is not obvious, stop and think how to use your team to solve the problem. Refrain from the desire to come up with the solution yourself. Instead think about the problem and consider how to frame a question for the team to answer, where creativity will be needed and where no one person could dominate the thinking.

How to avoid group think or insufficient ideas.

Set out the problem and ask everyone to make a list of possible solutions or ideas that could contribute to the solution. Encourage everyone to have at least 10 ideas. Carefully extract one idea per person, going around the group until all ideas are out in the open - posted on a whiteboard or flip chart for clarity - don’t allow any idea to be slammed - only clarified and be watchful for covert putdowns like seemingly innocent humour. Once the ideas are up on the board ask them to draw combinations that could create good solutions. Combination must include at least 50% of ideas from other people in the team. At this point allow the team to develop more depth by allowing sub-groups to form around these combinations of ideas. Your role is to make sure everyone has a voice and is respected for their contribution no matter how zany.

Teams need to learn how to be successful. Look for every opportunity to reinforce behaviour that promotes the value of the team and each individual contribution.