A Winning Team
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could describe your team as a winning team?
Every manager or business owner is looking for the ideal worker who would be a great addition to the team, and move business forward; the winning team that makes the impossible possible.
Winning teams are not born, they are made. Winning teams are made by the people who lead or manage them. Company histories are rife with stories of supposedly ‘bad’ teams who went on to become shining stars under different leadership.
How can you create a winning team? There are many principles and theories around the subject. In this article, I am going to share with you five things to help you build a winning team. I call them gifts. They are gifts because your people will appreciate it, and like every gift, it will return to you with interest – in this case, a team that delivers the right results.
Five Gifts For Your Team
1. Relationship
The business world shies away from emotions like the plague. Meanwhile, an unspoken code of business is relationship. Building a winning team starts with building relationships.
Start by treating your people as human beings with emotions, needs, and challenges. Treat them as unique individuals; get to know your people beyond their performance, CVs, and appraisals.
It is not a clinical fact gathering venture; it is an open vulnerable venture of knowing and being known. John C. Maxwell captures it this way – “Touch a heart before you ask for a hand.”
After you have been able to establish good relationships with your team, now you can inspire them to do same amongst themselves. It does not matter how individually talented the members of a group are; if they cannot work effectively together, they cannot deliver! Relationship is the yarn that weaves talented individuals into a winning team.
Your team must feel that they are of value individually and collectively, beyond what they do for you and the business. They must have a sense of belonging. To quote Theodore Roosevelt, “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”
“Relationship is the yarn that weaves talented individuals into a winning team.”
2. Ownership
I have heard managers complain repeatedly that their people lack initiative. These same people, who do not demonstrate initiative at work, actively take initiative in other places, including social gatherings and clubs. So how come they lack initiative at work? Ownership.
A winning team must know the vision, understand the vision, and own the vision. The point of ownership is the point at which they will go all out to make the vision happen. This is based on a pre-set vision (in other circumstances, the team must be part of the process of casting the vision).
Cast and Cascade
Cast the vision; then cascade it in creative, acceptable, and chewable ways. Lead them to get it. That is a major part of your job as a leader, manager, or business owner. The average manager is regularly THROWING vision, goals, and expectations AT workers, or throwing it in their face instead of throwing it TO them and guiding them to catch it. There is a big difference between sharing a vision with the intention of carrying your people along with you, and brandishing the vision like a deadly weapon, or a lame rhetoric.
By vision, I am referring to any objective or goal that must be met to push the business to a desired state. It could be a culture change goal, a work ethic or best practice goal, sales goal, project milestone goal, or the broader mission and vision of the business.
Help them win!
To help your team own the vision, you should be able to clearly articulate what the vision is, why it is important to the business, the community, and why they (the team) should buy into it, and finally, how they can help make it happen. If they believe the vision but do not know what to do or how to contribute to it, they cannot own it.
If you have done a good job of building relationships with your people, this step will be easier because if they are struggling, or have ideas that can help, they will talk to you!
“There is a big difference between sharing a vision, and brandishing the vision like a deadly weapon, or a lame rhetoric.”
3. Reward and Recognition
A touchy matter by many standards, Reward and Recognition are subjects everyone in a business or a corporate environment is familiar with, to a large extent. Though these two are not the same, for the purposes of this article, I am putting them together because they complement each other. Recognition without reward over prolong periods loses its appeal and impact. In the same vein, reward without recognition begins to ring hollow.
Ken Blanchard, in The One Minute Manager writes about the one minute praise – catch them doing something good and praise them for it.
Look for opportunities to praise
Deliberately look for opportunities to praise. Praise publicly and privately. When a project goes well, or a target is achieved, acknowledge everyone who contributed in anyway. Annexing all the glory dismembers the team spirit, and sets the tone for a downward spiral.
In addition to praise and recognition for a job well done, let the rewards in – bonuses, extra days of paid vacation, promotions they qualify for, and other perks available in your business or industry. Be creative about it. People who feel appreciated work better, and take better initiative. They feel inspired to do more.
Cultures and Systems that repeatedly reward seniority over competence, commitment, and performance, end up becoming exceptionally inefficient and ineffective.
4. Trust
Trust is an essential commodity that is increasingly becoming a scarce commodity. A Harvard Business Review survey indicates that 58 percent of workers trust strangers more than their bosses. The last thing you want to create in your work environment is a culture of mistrust. It happens to be one of the fastest ways of killing initiative and creating territorialism.
I recall a personal experience as a young executive. I was paired with an equally young executive from another department. Together, we were assigned to develop, produce, and mount a series of corporate communications materials for one of the firm’s multinational clients. The two of us worked day and night for two weeks, sometimes leaving the office close to midnight. The project was a resounding success; we had a very happy client.
Broken promises
Based on the success of the project, our bosses promised us a token of appreciation after the client made payment. Being the Client Service person on the project, I knew when the invoice got to the client, and when the payment came through. My colleague from the other department was monitoring with me for the promised ‘handshake’. After a while, we were told the token would be added to our end of year bonus.
Long story short, that ‘handshake’ never happened. Did I leave the firm because of that? Certainly not. It was a great place to work – the training, the exposure, the leverage. Being naturally driven, I appreciated the learning and let the rest slide. But, the next time I heard a promise of any sort, I took it with a full cup of salt (a pinch wouldn’t do). Time proved that promises were rampantly broken. As one would expect, in time, the firm lost a chunk of its best talents.
Can your people trust you? Can they take your word at face value or do they need to delve for implied and unspoken meanings?
If you want to build a winning team, foster trust with and within your team. Let your yea be yea, and your nay, nay. By the way, keep in mind that trust and transparency work together.
“People who feel appreciated work better, and take better initiative. They feel inspired to do more.”
5. Respect
Respect is a close cousin of recognition. Respect is a basic requirement for any relationship. Throw respect out and every relationship is endangered.
Respect your workers – from the youngest to the oldest, from the most experienced to the newest kid on the block. Treat them as you would want to be treated. If they have names or nicknames they are uncomfortable using in the workplace, respect them enough not to use it.
Call people to order when they are in the wrong, but do it with decorum. Disrespectful behaviour demoralises people and weakens your team. Be courteous. If you are going to be late for a meeting, alert them. Use the appropriate titles or name culture of your business environment.
When all is said and done
Relationship, Ownership, Reward and Recognition, Trust, Respect – this is by no means an exhaustive list. It does however set a strong foundation for building a winning team.
Augustina O. Oti-Twumasi is a communications strategist, and L&D practitioner. she loves to inspire change in herself and in others. She does this through her work as a Training and Workshop Facilitator, Learning and Development Consultant, Creative Writer, Life Coach, and Integrated Marketing Communications Strategist.
