Creating the right team is a vital step in growing a successful business. Business owners often share that a pain point in their business is that they can’t recruit, train or retain the right employees to build a winning team. The truth is, hiring the right people is just the first step towards building a successful team in your business. Without the right guidance or leadership, your team alone will not transform your business and take it to its next level of performance.
Great leaders build a great team around them. You will never build a great business on your own. The bigger and better the business you want, the bigger and better the team you will need! To be successful you must find the right people, give them the right training, and build a great team with everyone working together.
Winning teams do not happen by accident, nor do they occur overnight. At AddingZEROS, we believe that there are six key areas necessary to building a winning team. By learning these keys and developing a plan to implement them, you will have a great team that will take your business to new heights:
1. Strong Leadership:
A strong leader develops other leaders. John C. Maxwell states, “A leader who produces other leaders multiplies their influences.” Leadership is about action, not position. Everyone can be a leader with the right training and initiative.
Strong leaders create a working environment that encourages the cooperation of their team members. By encouraging and inspiring them, they, in turn, will inspire and encourage their customers.
Without strong leadership, even the best of teams will struggle to stay focused and motivated to improve performance. A strong leader brings passion and takes responsibility for keeping the team moving in the desired direction. A strong leader also looks for team members with heart and spirit before they concern themselves with what skills they have. Skills can be taught, but without heart and spirit a team member will not perform to their potential.
2. Common Goals:
To become a winning team, every team member needs to understand the organization’s common business goals. Without a common goal, team members tend to wander in different directions as they see fit. This goal allows everyone to ask themselves if what they are working on helps to achieve the goal or distracts them from the goal.
To determine a common goal, the first step is to clearly identify (in writing) the vision for the business or team. This goal should stem from the business owner’s vision and embody your company’s overall objective. It should also supersede all individual employee’s goals. Everyone will perform better when they know what they are reaching for.
3. Rules of the Game:
With the common goals in mind, the leader and the team should together define the “rules of the game” for your organization. Base these rules off your company’s core values and culture. When defining the rules, consider how your team will work together, interact with one another, treat your clients, and conduct business.
If the leader does not provide employees with the “rules of the game,” they will go outside the boundaries. These rules must be written down and available to everyone so there’s no scope for misunderstandings. If leaders don’t establish their company culture, the employees will create a de facto culture that may not be to the owner’s liking or in the best interest of the company.
4. Action Plan:
Great ideas, an inspiring vision, and even a happy workplace doesn’t automatically produce results. Results come from taking action. Create a strong action plan that spells out clear and unambiguous terms to all members of the team. While common goals identify where the owner and business want to go, the action plan identifies who does what by when to achieve these goals. This will help your team stay on track, and will hold each other accountable to their commitments.
A good plan will assign ownership of tasks, identify what resources are required, set timelines for when tasks should be completed, and provide measurement details of the status of the tasks over defined periods of time. Repetitive actions should be routinized and put on a regular calendar. Review and update these action plans on a regular basis.
5. Support Risk-Taking:
Business is all about risk and reward. To facilitate business growth, a leader must be willing to support prudent risk-taking by their team. Without risk-taking, the business will lag behind market leaders.
Supporting risk-taking means empowering your employees to make decisions and allowing them to solve problems. Encourage them to present ideas and reward them when they find ways to improve productivity or earn more money for the company.
6. 100% Inclusion and Involvement:
If you leave a few teammates on the sidelines, they will not create the environment needed for success. Everyone needs to be working together and supporting the business.
The art of inclusion is driven by communication to all members of the team. By providing 100% inclusion, the owner can require 100% involvement as an expectation of the organization’s culture. This will lead to trust and a comfort level between the owner and employees to delegate responsibilities.
When a leader provides 100% inclusion, the team has a choice to become involved. If the leader does not include them, they do not have the choice of becoming involved. If a leader includes the 100% of the team, but members decide not to be involved, it may be time to find a new team member.
By focusing on these six aspects of leadership, you will see changes in how your team works together as well as better results on your bottom line. How many of these keys are you doing successfully? Which do you need to work on? This month, I am offering a complimentary team assessment. Contact me today to learn more!