How’s the performance of your team? Are there days when you wonder if you’re accomplishing anything together? One of the problems some teams have is the assumption they are a team… when they aren’t. Although the determining factors of whether a team is really a team are many, one measure is the output of the team.
Last week, I wrote about the critical role of the team leader in a high performance team. The question often emerges, “So what does the team do?” The correct answer: it depends. It depends on the purpose of the team, their composition, their competency, their level of maturity, etc. However, you can often find some common behaviors in the best teams. I’ve written more extensively about this in my book, The Secret of Teams. For today’s post, here’s my top five list.
I recently started working on my 2013 calendar… have you? I’ve found over the years that unless I start thinking about the new year at least 6 months in advance, I spend a lot of time trying to catch up and make things work once the new year begins. My process is neither complicated nor original but it works for me.
As I shared in my post, What is the Secret of Teams?, one of the things we’ve discovered over the years is that the best teams not only have talented people and the requisite skills, they possess a powerful third ingredient – we call it Community. It’s what separates the great teams from the good ones. It is the turbo-charger for great team performance.
In my last post, I outlined five tips to improve your meetings. Here’s the balance of my Top 10.
One of the Team Skills I mentioned in my last post was Effective Meetings. Does the idea of a great meeting sound like an oxymoron to you? Let’s face it; most of the meetings we attend are not the model for productivity and efficiency. However, if done well, meetings multiply our time, increase our productivity, tap into the collective wisdom and creativity of the group, yield better decisions and better results. Done poorly, they are a colossal waste of time. So what can a leader do?
In some sports, the term “skill player” is used to identify players who have more complex roles… and earn more money. On my team at Chick-fil-A, I need every member to be a skill player. There are two types of skills I’m interested in. Let me explain.
People always watch the leader – whether you want them to or not. What are they looking for? Fundamentally, people are watching the leader for clues – clues regarding what’s important to the leader and clues to determine if the leader is trustworthy.
Great leaders Engage and Develop Others. This is the second practice in the SERVE model. There are actually three parts to this practice. I’ll start with the first and explain the others in upcoming posts.
During one of Peter Drucker’s public addresses late in his life, he was asked about the most important decision an executive (leader) makes. He answer was simply: “Who does what.”