Building and leading a team is one of the most challenging aspects of business life. To build a team from different individuals requires a lot of effort since it’s sometimes a long distance between Storming and Performing. And that effort to build an esprit de corps requires a certain amount of internal team focus in order to set objectives and to agree on common ways of working.
But after you build that team – perhaps even as you build that team – there are three types of insularity that you need to manage against. You have to combat each of these with principles and actions that lead to an environment of teamwork. I like to think of these as concentric circles of team orientation that you have to create:
- You relative to your team.
- Your team relative to your company.
- Your team relative to the market (aka “the outside world”).
There is no “I” in team, but there is an “M-E.” With a nod to Stuart Scott, one of the most difficult balances that a leader must strike is between yourself and the team you lead. By definition, a leader leads. That is what everyone expects and any good leader will use their competence, skills, ideas, and energy to set the tone for the team. But the leader’s role is also to find the right ways to maximize the value of their team members.
There are a limitless number of books that address frameworks for team-building, so I offer just two questions that encourage me to keep the first balance. The first is, for any material decision, “How have I utilized the talent and perspectives of the team members?” This helps ensure that I am not making key decisions in a vacuum. The second is, “When is the last time the team had a good fight?” By “good fight” I mean a rigorous discussion among the team members that demands looking at an issue from all sides and openly exploring all of the pros and cons. This helps ensure that I don’t have a team of yes-men and yes–women that are more concerned with harmony than true teamwork. It also helps ensure that I get the right kind of feedback and challenge to my points of view.
A really effective team is also connected to other teams in the organization. They are aware of the objectives and needs of other teams and work hard not just to meet their team and individual goals, but also to advance the “greater good.” As the leader, there are two ways that you can encourage this. First, make sure the people you lead understand that there are both specific team objectives and larger organization objectives that need to be considered. Both sets need to be explicit and part of performance management schemes. Second, get to know other leaders and groups in your organization, their domains, issues and aspirations. Be curious and learn more about their functions and the role they play. My goal (though it is honestly hard to achieve) is to spend at least 20-30 percent of my time with people who don’t report to me and aren’t in my areas of responsibility. That works for me as an individual and encourage my team members to connect in the same sorts of ways.
Finally, a really effective team keeps their eyes on the market – current customers, potential customers, influencers, competitors, and coming trends. Many teams can get too focused on internal things – how to improve their own processes, how to relate better to other teams, or sometimes even bogged-down in how to address internal politics. Your job is to keep them looking outside the walls and into the future. Ensure that you have and they have an informal network of peers who are more outward looking. Make a certain part of each meeting explicitly about the market (I would suggest at least 30-40 percent). Give each team member a personal responsibility to cover a topic in these team discussions – new technology trends that could affect your business, key moves/announcements from your most important competitors, changes in your most important customer segments that could affect your business, etc. This will help keep your agenda fresh and outward-looking.
Focus on creating these concentric circles of team orientation and you’ll combat insularity and quickly find a higher level of performance in your team.
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