He also focused—as any leader should—on how each new player’s personality, talents and abilities would mesh to meet the team goals.
“It’s not just a matter of getting the fastest, strongest and smartest players on your side,” says J. Allan McCarthy, author of Beyond Genius, Innovation & Luck: The ‘Rocket Science’ of Building High-Performance Corporations. “As Michael Jordan put it, ‘Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”
McCarthy suggests these five tips for building a successful team:
1. Lead with a team, not a group: A team of leaders behaves very differently than a group of leaders. Many companies don’t know the difference. “It comes down to clear goals, interdependencies and rules of engagement,” McCarthy says.
2. Know your goals: McCarthy cites Bill Gates: “Teams should be able to act with the same unity of purpose and focus as a well-motivated individual.”
It’s great to have a stockpile of smart, hard-working employees, but what would that be like on the football field. Corporations need their personnel to think out-of-the-box, but also work within a system to achieve common objectives.
3. Not everyone can be the coach – or the quarterback: The problem with executives is that they all want to lead and none want to follow, McCarthy says. A team made up of executives is like a group of thoroughbred stallions confined to a small space called an organization — plenty of kicking, biting and discord. Thoroughbreds don’t naturally work well as a team.
Better to define responsibilities that build a “foxhole mentality,” wherein one person has the gun, the other the bullets, McCarthy says. It’s in the best interests of both for each to succeed.
4. The strongest teams are adept at resolving conflict: Hiring the best and the brightest should create a diverse, competent group — but inevitably these stallions generate friction that can sabotage company progress.
So, sensitize team members to the early warning signs: know-it-all attitudes, multi-tasking during team meetings, exhibiting dominant behavior, not responding in a timely fashion or engaging in avoidance. Agree, as a team, on how to mutually manage and minimize counterproductive behaviors as they surface.
5. Create individual and team agreements: Here is where the “rubber meets the road” – it’s the final stage of planning who will do what for team objectives, as well as a collective agreement on team rules and interdependencies.
Ask individuals to openly commit to what they will do, and how the team is to function. The public declaration stresses employee obligation and collaborative management.
“We live in a 21st-century economy where speed and efficiency is a top priority, and that often means a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ mentality,” McCarthy says. “But you get the team that you plan for, not necessarily what you pay for. If time is money, then I’d invest it in creating and building a championship team.”
