When I first started my business, I interviewed over 50 leaders in a variety of industries asking them to identify their top three challenges, what they were doing to overcome those challenges and what they felt were key competencies for leaders in the future.  One of the top challenges across all industries was the need to identify and develop our future leaders.  One of the most important competencies identified for those future leaders is their ability to lead teams.  The challenges we face are so complex that we cannot expect to go it alone as a leader.  And, one of the most effective instruments we have as leaders to influence culture is our ability to build and develop strong teams.  Based upon that earlier research and my own experience, I offer a few best practices:

1. Make sure that you are actually leading a team and not just a group of people who report to you.  In order to do this you're going to have to treat that group of people as a team. How do you do that? By having regular team meetings that highlight the team goals and the collaboration required to meet those goals.  (One client shared with me that she only met one-on-one with her direct reports so as to not waste their time in meetings.  When I pointed out the benefit of having everyone focused on the same goals while collaborating and executing on those goals, a lot more work could get done, she quickly adopted brief, weekly team meetings.)
2. Make sure that the team goals are clear to the team and that everyone knows his or her role as well as the mission, vision and role of the team in the organization.
3. Communicate clearly within the team.  A way to jump start this is to understand your own and others' communication styles in order to more effectively communicate and use your individual differences for better problem-solving and decision-making.
4. Meeting etiquette is key - Make sure that you have an agenda, meeting purpose and a set of ground rules for all your meetings.
5. Manage the good and the bad behaviors.  Make sure that everyone's opinion is heard and do not allow any sort of bullying, such as interruptions, dissing of someone else's input, etc.  I usually try to address bad behavior as immediately as possible, both during the meeting and then later to make sure that my message was heard.
6. Defer to the wisdom of your team.  Sometimes as leaders we can shut down team members.  Understand your communication style and flex it to bring out the best in others on the team.
7. Improve your own emotional intelligence and know your trigger points.
8. Be mindful of group behavior and use assessments and other ways to get to know yourself, the other team members and to help the team learn and grow.

Strong teams are our best weapon for improving the effectiveness of our organizations.  Per W. Edwards Deming, "Research shows that the climate of an organization influences an individual's contribution far more than the individual himself."  Creating strong teams is one of the quickest routes to improving the climate of the organization.

Also see the article, Improving Team Performance at the end of this newsletter help your team get effective fast!

If you have any questions about this article, hit reply to this message!

When a good friend who also happens to be well read tells you about a great book, you pay attention.  My friend, Cathy Anwyl who is also a seasoned Human Resources executive and leader sent me the following note:

I wanted to share with you a new book that recently came out that I think you would enjoy - I have finished my first read and am going back to re-read.  The book is Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World.  It is authored by General Stanley McChrystal (US Army, Retired) and three associates.  You may recall that he played a significant role during the war with Iraq; he has since started a consulting group and teaches at Yale.  He outlines how Al Qaeda changed the way the war was being fought and the change he had to lead the military, et al through to respond.  I think you will find the book fascinating given your educational background and your areas of focus.  I think this book should be a must read for anyone in business leadership.

In addition to the experience in the theater of war, he provides some very interesting examples where organizations had to completely rethink how they approached various issues - much of what comes out may seem a bit obvious but like any institution/organization, we tend to think within the boundaries of conventional wisdom.  In the case of Al Qaeda, the US Military was forced to make significant changes (including breaking down long time silos and getting people ready for a new method of management/leadership) if we were going to achieve success.  He is very open around where the opportunities were.

When I mentioned that I had read the book review in the Wall Street Journal, Cathy's opinion was that they had actually undersold it.  What is intriguing is the new organizational model the authors describe that was used in battle that also has practical implications for leading teams in many industries.  In graduate school we often discussed how organizations needed to be viewed and managed as evolving organic systems rather than the hierarchical organizations that have been in fashion since the work of Frederick Taylor at dawn of the industrial age.  And though this makes sense, what is tough to discern is just HOW we go about leading these organic organizations without completely abdicating all accountability.

Here's what it says on the book's website:

What if you could combine the adaptability, agility, and cohesion of a small team with the power and resources of a giant organization?

 When General Stan McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2003, he quickly realized that conventional military leadership approaches were failing. Al Qaeda in Iraq was a decentralized network that could move quickly, strike ruthlessly, and seemingly vanish into the local population. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training-but none of that seemed to matter.

To defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, McChrystal and his colleagues discarded a century of conventional wisdom and remade the task force, in the midst of a grueling war, into something new: a network that combined transparent communication with decentralized decision-making authority. The walls between silos were torn down. Leaders looked at the best practices of the smallest units and found ways to extend them to thousands of people on three continents, using technology to establish a oneness that would have been impossible even a decade or two earlier. The task force became a "team of teams"-faster, flatter, more flexible-and beat back Al Qaeda.

In this powerful book, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be relevant to countless businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations. The world is changing faster than ever, and the smartest response for those in charge is to give small groups the freedom to experiment while driving everyone to share what they learn across the entire organization. As the authors argue through compelling examples, the team of teams' strategy has worked everywhere from hospital emergency rooms to NASA and has the potential to transform organizations large and small.

This would be a great book for book discussion around Leading Teams.  If you're interested in a virtual book discussion of this book, drop me a note via email.