In the age of modern technologies and shifting economies, running a business is like owning a sports club. In order to overcome any challenges your company faces and achieve your goals, you need an all-star team that will “carry you” towards the finish line and help you win championships. Behind every great story or a product, there is always a great team of inspired people. But do not mistake this for hiring great employees. The importance of teambuilding or being part of one goes far beyond your company. It is everyone around us – at your workplace, in your house or your neighborhood shop. You can be an entrepreneur starting a new company, a designer building an agency or someone who is starting a new book club, regardless of your professional or personal aspirations, teamwork always beats individual work through improved efficiency and productivity, collective thinking and other efforts. Still, it’s one thing to create a team, but quite another to create teamwork and a flourishing all-start roaster. Here are three ways you can build an all-star team:
1. Build trust and respect
Nurturing a team-oriented environment based on trust and respect, without which there will be no unity, will help you establish a team of different people that will support each other and act as a unified front. As a leader, you need to be straightforward and honest with everyone, communicate openly and expect the same in return. But the goal is not to force it. If you can create the right trustworthy climate within your surroundings, things will flow naturally.
You also have to lead by example. The easiest way to lose someone’s trust and confidence is to let them down and make them lose confidence in your ability to execute. Do not make false promises, set deadlines you can’t meet, or lie to your employees about your motives. Center for Management & Organization Effectiveness states that without these fundamental pillars in place, your team members are likely to feel that they can’t rely on one another, and as a result, communication falters, productivity and engagement stagnate, innovation stops, and the entire workplace begins to unravel.
2. Blame games are toxic for the team
You also need to make sure that people within your team are supporting each other and not playing the blame game. Mistakes will happen – that is just the way life works. If your culture allows others to point fingers at one another, your environment will quickly become toxic and collapse. Incentivise active communication, embrace the mistakes and help everyone learn from them, organize team workshops and field trips and start treating your team members as your family. At the end of the day, they are truly your second family.
3. Pick the right team leaders
- Yes, you are a leader and your venture is expanding. Now you need help managing different segments of your endeavor. Selecting the right people to manage your team or different departments within your company can sometimes make or break your business. In a nutshell, you need to create or hire winners that will be able to create more winners and inspire people to achieve personal greatness. It is often like selecting the right husband or a wife – they will play a key role in the upbringing of your children. In order to become a better leader, you can focus on the following:
- Serve as a role model – good leaders exemplify the behaviors and characteristics that they encourage in their followers.
- Be passionate about the objectives you want your team to achieve – genuine passion and enthusiasm for your goals will inspire others to help you achieve them.
- Have a positive attitude – everyone has problems, but any negativity can only discourage people.
- Encourage people to speak up – encouraging your team members to contribute their opinion to key discussions and feel involved will make them passionate about your mission.
If you are running a growing business, leadership is a crucial factor in your success story and will impact your entire journey. Courtney Associates, a dynamic Management Development and Training Organization, shared a great example of the importance of leadership from the Ford Motor Co case study. Until 2006, the company had been struggling financially for over 20 years, losing approximately a point of market share year on year. They appointed a new CEO and sure enough, the company very quickly started to make money again. Ford didn’t make any changes to its senior team; the difference was inspirational leadership. Such a simple but important decision saved Ford and pushed it back to the top. Do you remember when Steve Jobs left Apple and later came back to save it? Right?
4. Get to know your team
When you are hiring professionals, you have a unique opportunity to ask your candidates the right questions and measure them both personally and professionally. Yes, learning more about their employment history is great, but you should be asking questions you really want the answers to. Your goal should be to learn more about their aspirations and how they’ve handled difficult situations. You can always teach skills, but it’s impossible to give a person the right drive, attitude and a work ethic. People that are motivated by your vision will stick with you long-term, grow within your company and use their expertise to help you achieve your objectives. Someone might be the biggest expert in their field, but if their mindset is wrong and does not fit well within your culture, it will poison your entire team and cause havoc that you might not be able to recover from.
By learning more about your team members, you will also be able to understand their strengths and weaknesses. This means that you will have a clear picture of the role they could play within your team and the flaws you need to help them improve. This strategy is used by sports clubs across the globe working on building all-star teams and winning games. As a business owner, there are several ways to get to know more about your team and show them your appreciation:
- One-on-one meetings or coaching sessions, allowing you to individually get to know your team members and exchange some experiences with them. See how they can drive the performance of your team here.
- Intro sessions, where you can ask your team members to give the entire room a simple overview of their background. Furthermore, this way you can also incentivize networking sessions.
- Voluntary happy hours and dinners for your team so they can feel more relaxed and open to mingling. While you can try to do this at your office, it is very difficult – no matter how hard you try, you’re still surrounded by laptops and conference rooms.
- Icebreakers are a great way and a technique to make the environment more relaxing. For example, you can ask team members to bring a letter from a friend or a family member and share it with the rest of the team. It should be a response to the question “How would your family and friends describe you?”. You will laugh, share stories and establish a strong bond early on.
Showing appreciation for the hard-work or ideas that your team members are contributing to your cause will help you earn respect and position yourself as someone they are willing to follow. Then you can start investing in their progress and education knowing that they will stick with you long-term. If you are building a company and facing difficulties related to hiring the right people, you can always use outstaffing to grow your company. Oustaffing enables you to easily expand your team through development partnerships, you will get access to a pool of all-star developers and accelerate your progress. Furthermore, unlike outsourcing, it gives you complete management control over your new hires. They can join your existing team and help you establish a thriving culture within your working environment.
In SHORE teams, we are working with a large number of companies, helping them identify ideal nearshore and offshore partners. Through these partnerships, our clients can achieve their development goals and grow their all-star roster. If you are exploring outstaffing as a cheaper and more efficient hiring method, send us a message and we will be happy to help you.
Just remember, whatever personal or professional goal you are chasing in life, never forget that big goals might be envisioned by individuals but they are achieved by hard-working and committed teams. As the American former professional basketball player, coach, and executive in the National Basketball Association, Phil Jackson said, “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” In a nutshell, it takes one person to see the stars but it takes two or more people to reach them.
