May

26

How to Build a Great Team

Filed Under Team Leadership 

The article “How to Build a Great Team” by Charlie Feld, provides a great overview of what it takes to build a great team. Charlie found that the “secret sauce” of great leaders are:

Character: Doing the Right Thing

My definition of character is …. what you do, not what you say. Not only the right thing from a business or economic aspect, but the right thing including social and philosophical dimensions…. People will rally around leaders who do the right things consistently. They know they can count on their leaders to be open and honest at every fork in the road and to take a stand regardless of the personal risk. When people feel their leaders are erratic, political or detached from them, they will become cynical. They will generally do their work but won’t be committed. Their trust can only be built over time, so don’t become discouraged if people take a “show me” attitude.

Leadership Development: The Most Important Task

The second competency required for great execution is developing the leadership skills of your team. Organizations are seldom led by a single person, no matter how charismatic. The team at the top determines the environment and the culture. The team decides what gets rewarded, punished, recognized and ignored. Although they don’t run all of the plays, they call the plays.

For CIOs, it’s important to remember that the team at the top represents and reflects your character and agenda. Regardless of what you say you believe, who you choose for your IT leadership team speaks more loudly. So choosing and developing your leadership team is the single most important competency of a leader. This is a time-consuming task. Many great leaders talk about spending up to one-third of their time on leadership development. Since no one is perfect, everyone needs help and coaching.

Developing leaders means that you can articulate the requirements in a clear and thoughtful way. Without a basic framework of leadership skills, it’s hard to evaluate and give people feedback-and without constructive feedback, most people will not change and grow.

Passion: The Organizational Energy Level

Passion for the job is hard to manufacture, but when present, it is contagious. Enthusiasm from a leader enables people to sustain themselves through demanding times. The energy level of an organization is set at the top.

Influence and Persuasion: Better than Power

Executives tend to think it is much easier and less time-consuming to just tell their direct reports what to do. Part of leadership, however, lies in spending time to explain a directive, in giving employees perspective and in helping them understand the “why” behind the direction. This is influence-the flip side of positional power. It is easy to rely on positional power and forget the usefulness of influencing skills.

Leaders have the responsibility of developing people and building teams. How are you doing? What percentage of your time do you spend developing the people around you?

“Develop everyone you touch.” - Robert Greenleaf

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One Response to “How to Build a Great Team”

  1. Ellen Weber on May 26th, 2006 21:06

    Great mix of leadership growth and ethics — how rich and so true.. Thanks for this thoughtful post Charrlie. Added to the quote: “Executives tend to think it is much easier and less time-consuming to just tell their direct reports what to do. Part of leadership, however, lies in spending time to explain a directive, in giving employees perspective and in helping them understand the “why” behind the direction. This is influence-the flip side of positional power. It is easy to rely on positional power and forget the usefulness of influencing skills.” I’d like to see leaders ask others for their ideas — many times the very questions can grow leadership in all of us and build the teams at the same time…. What do you think?

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