How do I bring my team to life?
A friend asked me yesterday: “How do I bring my team to life?”.
He’s setting up a new business team for a new product and wanted to discuss how he could enthuse them. After talking about culture, alignment to the task and mission critical outcomes we then looked at the team from the employees point of view.
I shared with him a three point strategy for team building that I often find team leaders find interesting and here are some of the expectations we discussed but from a team member’s point of view:
To be a good team leader you need to “Discover me”
- Recruit for my strengths but understand my weaknesses
- Find out how I learn best
- Discover what interests me
- Understand my aspirations
To gain my enthusiasm you need to “Steer Me”
- Show me the course we will be sailing and the points we’ll see on the way
- Describe to me what end of the journey (success) looks like
- Provide coaching and mentor me
- Protect me along the journey so I don’t fall overboard
Support me
- Be my biggest fan
- Celebrate with me my successes and tell everyone else
- Challenge me to do better and bigger than even I thought I could
- Commit yourself to my success as an individual part of this team