START YOUR WEEK WITH THE COACH
“My top ten team-building tips.”
During an off-site event, Carolyn Lantz, executive director of brand imaging for Ford Motor Company, gave her executives $50 each and put them on a bus to an Old Navy store. She said, “You have 20 minutes to find and purchase an outfit that you have to wear tomorrow. You are busy people looking for a great design at a great price that describes our Ford customers.”
That exercise made a point to her team. Ford products need to be well designed, democratically priced and team built. Great leaders leading the best teams realize early that you must build a team or you never reach your goals, or worse, you fail in your mission.
Here my top ten tips for building great teams:
1. Be clear and compelling when expressing your mission, vision, values and strategy.
2. Be fair and consistent in your performance behavior standard. Have ONE standard for everyone, including leaders.
3. Delegate the workload fairly, enabling everyone to succeed, develop and deliver superior results.
4. Don’t micromanage. Assign the task, align the goals to expected results. Then, get out of the way.
5. Provide adequate resources. Ensure they have all they need to win, or know for certain they have the ability to get them.
6. Allow for open, honest and mature debate in an atmosphere of support without losing sight of the goal.
7. Don’t play the blame game. You win or lose as a team. No one wins unless everyone wins.
8. Use the team effort to strengthen individuals. No one runs for cover among the group, and no one provides cover for inferior effort.
9. Affirm the value of the individual within the team culture by recognizing and rewarding individual achievement that everyone celebrates.
10. Celebrate together every win large or small. Great leaders know how to make the most of every success, even “successful failures.”
Like Carolyn Lantz at Ford, does your team know their expected result and how to get there? It’s very hard to energize a team when there are no targets or goal lines!