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March 20, 2017
What we’re going to talk about today is TEAM.
Team is a multiplier… and what I mean by that is that you can take a fantastic group of individuals and you can bring them together with a team that sucks and get nothing from that team OR you can get a group of fantastic individuals and bring them together and you can make them awesome.
I’ve got a process that has five practical things that you can do to create a kick- arse team. If you’re a leader and you want to use this with your team stick around.
What we’re talking about is five things that you can do to take your team from dysfunctional to awesome. It really starts with getting clear that teams need two clear things. They need clarity and teamwork. In 2015 I worked with this team that I had a really great plan for (that’s one of the steps, a really clear plan) and everyone was like “That looks fantastic on paper”… but what happens with most plans is that they get put on the shelf.
What I worked out is that even if teams have brilliant plans, if they don’t have teamwork they can’t be awesome.
Because teamwork is the multiplier. We take what’s brilliant about every single individual and we enhance it and make it sing.
You need clarity and teamwork to get results. “Results” means results for the team, results for every single individual in the team, they also mean results for the organisation.
Here are the five things you install.
First thing: You need a plan. You need a destination and a purpose (I call that a reason). You need 12 month goals and you need to break it down into quarters and have quarterly objectives (I just spent yesterday doing that with a team).
But that plan in itself is not enough, because once that team has clarity of destination… sometimes they just can’t execute.
So what we do next is: we install an execution rhythm (and I just spent time with this team agreeing on six principles that they’re going to adhere to in the next quarter to help them execute on their priorities).
The third thing you need as a team, (and this is what I help people and teams and leaders build all the time) is courage.
Courage comes from the commitment to the plan. What we want to build in this team is courage, commitment and clarity, a rhythm and a plan.
Teamwork is the multiplier, so once you’ve got those things in place for clarity, what you want to do is build two things in place for teamwork – firstly high trust.
There was a study in the Harvard Business Review just this month saying that when you’ve got a high trust environment you get 106% more energy and 29% more satisfaction and this is from a guy who has studied trust and the neuroscience of trust over the last twelve years.
Trust is what drives this multiplier effect…So the trust piece that we want to install is: Every single quarter we want to identify one behaviour that team is going to change to create more teamwork… and we just work on it. One per quarter. Each quarter we stop as a group and we assess “Did that behaviour create more teamwork?” and if it didn’t we put another one in place and we keep adding and building as that trust increases.
The second thing around teamwork is: Teams don’t exist in a vacuum they exist FOR someone and to SERVE someone. So we have high trust, but the thing we need to do is create meaning for our stakeholders. Your job is to take your plan, your clarity and execute on it but create meaning from that plan for the stakeholders you work with – employees, clients, your owners. You’ve got to create meaning in terms of a future.
So all these things I help teams install and I do it over twelve months. The three things I would want you to work on to get clarity in your team is a plan, a strategic plan about where you’re going, the courage and commitment with each other but also to push yourself to execute it, and a rhythm where you identify each quarter the things that you need to do to deliver on your plan. Around teamwork: two clear things. Keep identifying one behaviour every quarter that works to build trust. And develop a short story that you can tell that creates meaning for your stakeholders. If you do those five things it will give you the clarity and teamwork you need to deliver results.
Five things to install to get a kick-arse team!
A couple of things…
One is: leave me a comment down below… If this has been relevant for your team how might you go about implementing a couple of these things to get your team moving in the right direction so that your team is a multiplier for the individuals that are within it.
Second thing: You might now understand how to do it and what to do… but there’s a big difference between information and implementation. For most of the companies I work with and the teams I work with it takes 12 months or sometimes 24 months to put these 5 things in place.
Right down the bottom here is a big orange button that says “Talk to Andrew“ and if you want to talk about implementation, about how to put these things in place for your team it’s just a 30 minute chat and we’ll work out if we’re right to work together.
Talk to you soo, cheers bye!
