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Build An A-Team

IF YOU are managing a team, ask yourself these questions:

• How well is your team performing?
• How much more could you be getting out of it?
• What is holding it back from greatness?
• Are the people on your team glad they are there?
• How could you support them even better?
• How does your leadership harm or enrich your team?

If you want your team to live up to their potential, you have to approach team-building from a different mindset. Modern teambuilding requires more than bureaucratic, heavy-handed rules and regulations, and command and control mandates.

It requires updated, creative and flexible people-centred strategies that are aligned with organisational objectives. Only then can your team produce results that will catapult the organisation forward.

Here are 12 executive leadership strategies for building a world-class team that can compete with anyone.

1 Make your team nimble, fast and flexible. The best teams learn and perform on the fly. Build in flexibility and mobility in your team.

2 Have more teams of smaller size. Make your team size manageable and dedicated to specific issues they can tackle quickly and successfully.

3 Make sure each team has a unifying vision and mandate. A team vision is a winning vision. Create an inspiring view of what the team will do once it is successful.

4 Turn your team members into learning machines. A team that learns well is a team that succeeds. Help it to learn continuously and enthusiastically.

5 Give your team a special identity. It could be a motto or a work tool that will make it stand out and feel special. Give it something to brag about and be well-known for.

6 Continually raise the selfesteem of your team. Assume your team will succeed mightily. Tell your team members you have complete faith in them and how much you appreciate their efforts.

7 Give your team decisionmaking autonomy. Enhance team communication and smoothen processes by allowing as many intra-team decisions as possible. Reduce the organisational drag on your team.

8 Allow your team to be a creative factory. Honour and encourage innovation so your teams can lead the edge. Respect bold forays into the unknown and reward big thinking.

9 Give your team a nourishing, challenging environment. Supply your team with everything it needs for success. Support, encourage and nudge your team, and then get out of its way and let it succeed.

10 Make your team a living, breathing entity, not a bureaucracy. Slash the paperwork, the reporting and the ponderous meetings. Allow your team to infuse projects with its own blood and energies.

11 Give your team a crisp, open communication architecture. Construct a friendly, smart and responsive feedback system and watch it succeed.

12 Know when not to have a team. A smart leader knows when a team should not be a team. Stop forcing inappropriate work on a team and let the members do the important work they were built to do.

Teams must be respected for what they are capable of when fortified with the proper organisational nutrients and be allowed to run with their mandates. To catapult your team to new heights, get out of its way and trust your team members to perform to their potential.

– Source: Straits Times/Asia News Network

Article by Bill Cole, an authority on peak performance, mental toughness and coaching, and founder and CEO of Procoach Systems