Achieving Superior Results: Recognizing the Immense Value of a Team
Teams rivet themselves to the vision more easily than individuals working alone. With regular accountability and collaboration, teams can more clearly assess potential hindrances and trajectories of decisions, observing how an action done on the front lines of the organization either reinforces or sabotages the company vision.
Building a Powerful Team: Foundational Characteristics
Perhaps one of the best examples of true teamwork is conveyed by Thomas Quick as he describes a surgical team, headed by a surgeon. The team includes surgical assistants, nurses, anesthetist, and technician. Each function is specialized and highly skilled, and each person knows that his or her success is dependent on the other members of the team. All are committed to one objective—the well being of the patient.
Strategically Choosing Your Inner Circle: Why This Matters
The inner circle of the leader (the team within the team) and other chosen team members should possess a heart of integrity. An effective leader must not overlook character shortfalls despite impressive credentials of experience, personality, or education.
First Class Skills: Enhancing One’s Own Leadership
While supervision and management are of great importance, the actual building of a team is the paramount task of executive leaders. Kouzes and Posner emphasize building a team to accomplish the work at hand: “A one-word test for differentiating between leaders and managers that came through loud and clear in case studies was the use of we instead of I.
Exponential Leadership: It Starts on the Inside
With solid character emitting from the heart of a leader, other virtues naturally emanate, exemplifying the standards for the team. Effective leaders and their staff members can be compared to a ship’s captain and the crew: even though it is essential that the ship’s captain have some vision of what lies beyond the horizon, it is also important that the crew understand the standards by which their performance will be assessed as they sail toward it.
Compounding Impact: The Divine Origins of Teamwork
While often overlooked and undervalued, God’s social nature reveals key components of successful team-mindedness and activity. Executive leaders who consider and explore these observations can better display these insights within their own teams through collaboration, partnerships, and team-mindedness. This trickles throughout the whole organizational population, leaving positive effects inside and outside the company.
Infusing Team-Mindedness to Compound Cohesion
The quality of relationships among the executive leadership team is a primary factor in developing effective teams throughout the whole organization. Researchers Hersey and Blanchard indicate that the most significant factors in the productivity of an organization pertain to the interpersonal relationships therein. These relationships are foundational to the success of effective teams. This is a linchpin for all leaders.
Overcoming the Leadership Vacuum: Harnessing the Compounding Power of Teamwork
The success of organizations depends on strong, visionary leadership. Companies can compensate for the absence of certain skills and resources but cannot overcome the absence of effective leadership. This leads to a high level of frustration among leaders and team members. What causes this dilemma? The leaders’ skill sets are weighted toward other areas. Consequently, a massive leadership vacuum develops.
Part 4: Valuing Leadership Over Management
One element of being effective is understanding the difference between managing others and leading them. Management is about handling things—numbers, facts, budgets, details, accounts, schedules, etc. Successful managers are people who can manage/control/handle responsibilities. Leadership, on the other hand, comes from the root “to go.” The word “leader” denotes moving forward and progress. Managing is about handling, but not necessarily about motion.
OWN YOUR TEAM’S DEVELOPMENT
It is very important that we, as leaders, determine what developmental stage our team is in, not only for the purpose of knowing our responsibilities, but because your team needs to work its way through the elements of each phase. There are valuable formation skills that are attained through each stage. Wise leaders regularly reflect on those under their care, both individually and as a team.
FORMING & STORMING
We can learn from the past. Past leaders. Past events. Past lessons. Several years ago, the National Research Laboratories examined successful teams from World War II to determine if there were common dynamics that contributed to their success. Their research defined four stages of successful team development. The first stage for team development is forming – the time when a team first comes together. The second stage of team development is called storming – the time when team members struggle with identifying their place within the team.
Making Others Successful: SUCCESS THROUGH COACHING
If you have ever played on a team, whether academic, athletic, or a hobby, you’ve experienced coaching. This individual who serves as “Coach” invests knowledge, understanding, know-how, personal experience, and study into making others more capable and successful in that specific field. Professionally, these individuals go by different names: supervisor, manager, director, trainer. But they all involve elements of coaching. Coaches prepare the team to successfully think through potential challenges, using the resources at hand to find solutions, and lead them into fruitful production and achieving goals.