Make your common purpose compelling by making it personal and shared. The poster says ‘There is no I in team’ but in fact a powerful way of delivering high performance is not quashing self-interest but aligning it with the team’s interest. It is far more productive to focus on ‘the right thing for me is also the right thing for we’.
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Move hearts as well as minds. Inspire your team with a vivid picture of a better future. Connect the team’s work to an exciting, meaningful outcome and a result that’s worthwhile to them. It doesn’t have to mean anything to anyone else. It only needs to matter to your team.
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Inject a sense of urgency. Action trumps inertia when the alternative is worse. Turn your team’s attention to the peril and the price of doing nothing. Make the most of a crisis by harnessing the focusing power of urgency to propel them into purposeful action. Build momentum through early successes that demonstrate progress is possible.
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Go beyond business as usual. Shifting gears to become a higher performing team requires the energy and excitement of a real challenge. An adventure where success is not guaranteed will mobilize your team to act differently. Becoming better will not happen by doing the same things in the same way.
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Teams need a shared roadmap: a realistic appraisal of where they are, clarity on what success looks like, and a common path to that success. Asking each member to write down the team’s objectives soon reveals whether your team is on the same page – or even on the same planet.
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Take a robust view of reality by taking off your rose-tinted glasses. Form a brutally honest assessment of what is working and what isn’t. Confronting the pain early enough to be able to do something about it is far better than attempting to recover from failure when it’s too late.
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Leaders flex their leadership style according to circumstances. Rather than having one preferred or dominant style, you need to be able to shift the way you lead between the four core styles of leadership to suit the current situation and the individuals on your team: Controlling, Coaching, Consulting and Collaborating.
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Control. At the beginning of a team’s life or your tenure as the team leader, when you do not yet have the insight into the team’s capabilities, the right approach is to exert authority and control. It is far easier to start tighten and loosen control as needed.
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Coach. Where team members are more skilled, shift to guiding the team, giving critical advice at key moments. While coaching your whole team, remember you are first and foremost coaching people. Tailor your approach to each individual and their particular needs; find an approach that works for them.
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Consult. Have the confidence to recognize when and where you might not have the right answer. If you believe your team may know best, invite discussion and ask the right questions. You are looking to support your team and encourage them to take greater responsibility for future action.
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Collaborate. When the team is performing effectively, effective team leaders know when to get out of the way and hand over the remote control to the team. In this style of leadership, you will increasingly be collaborating as a first amongst equals in a web of mutual accountability.
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Create a team of leaders. Developing leaders across the team is developing a better team. The strongest teams are those in which more members inspire, support, challenge and hold each other accountable. Yet even in teams full of capable leaders you remain ultimately accountable. A leader’s work is never done.
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The ideal team member has a strong but not a big ego, with the confidence to flourish amid the give and take in a team. They are masters of their own role but also inspire, challenge and cajole the best from others. They act as multipliers of their teammates’ performance.
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Keep standards high. One of the most certain ways of diluting your team’s performance is to allow selection standards to slide. Allowing weaker talent to slip through the net sends a strongly misleading signal to the rest of the team. Remember that first-class people hire first-class people, but second-class people hire third-class people.
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Excellence is a habit. No team becomes better without practice. The most powerful process for teams to become better is to identify the most important areas where they need to collaborate, define a shared approach to working together and then practise it over and over until it becomes second nature.
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Clarify roles. To get the most out of your team make sure that each member has three levels of clarity about team roles: 1) what is expected of them and why it matters, 2) a practical understanding of the other team roles and 3) how the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
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Ensure the team is as level as possible: to avoid unnecessary layers, deliver agile responses to changing events and allow a freer flow of information, ideas and feedback. But don’t discount the benefits of having a final authority to cut through the Gordian knots which teams can tie themselves into.
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Build bridges beyond the team. Reaching out to other individuals and organizations is an important source of support and resources your team may not possess. Identifying who to engage with and building productive relationships is a team task. Speaking with one voice will enable your team to maximize its influence.
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Earn trust by showing you care and that you have your teammates’ best interests at heart. Backing them up when they need help, going the extra mile to support them and showing your appreciation for their efforts are trust-building behaviours, especially if done equally across the team rather than only with a favoured few.
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Earn trust by overcoming conflict and crisis. Surviving the inevitable conflict accelerates trust in a team, but facing a crisis before trust is firmly established can cause terminal damage to your team. You should invest early in building cohesion as trust tends to be scarce when you need it most.
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Encourage creative abrasion. Contrary to the myth of the harmonious team, your goal is not to build a team without conflict, but to channel conflict effectively. You need to harness the energy and creativity that comes from the combination of push and pull between the diverse members of your team.
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Guard against groupthink and your team becoming too cohesive. The conditions for ‘groupthink’ are the presence of a strong leader, a cohesive group and strong external pressures. All three characteristics are positive determinants of a team’s success, but overplayed and unleavened by conflict they can push your team towards the dark side.
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Be cautious about compromise. Splitting the difference has the merit of being a fast, fair resolution to conflict in your team. If your team meets in the middle too often, however, you run the risk of ending up with average answers rather than the most creative ones where everyone wins.
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Eyes on the prize. Clear, compelling common purpose ensures your team is committed to what really matters. Your objective should be to find a win-win-win solution, satisfying each side of the conflict and the team as a whole. Underlining common purpose ensures a focus on your shared goal and the need to work together.
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Be obsessive about improvement. The team spirit you should nurture is one of experimentation and excellence. This is an essential paradox of high performance, the need simultaneously to aim for excellence and acknowledge the importance of failure. Teams that aim to make no mistakes end up making nothing of consequence.
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Don’t play the blame game. Whenever you conduct a robust and rigorous review you need to guard against your team playing the blame game. Fear of being blamed and shamed in front of their colleagues can force team members to hide problems – untreated, these can often come back bigger and with much more damaging consequences.
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Excellence is a habit. Weave new behaviours into the fabric of the team by recognizing them through rewards and crafting team stories that celebrate collective achievements. Over time and through repeated rehearsal and success, the shared approach will become a habit, a part of the team culture, ‘the way we do things around here’.
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PIXAR
The power of common purpose
‘There was so much trust between us. We all had slightly different talents and there was immense respect for what each person brought to the collaboration. It doesn’t matter whose idea it is. We use the one that makes the movie better.’
John Lasseter
Black Friday’ – 26 November 1993, Walt Disney Co., Burbank, California
Pixar are in production on their first full-length feature film, Toy Story, green-lighted by Disney in 1992. The opportunity to make the movie represents the culmination of decades of pioneering and loss-making R&D by Pixar in the field of computer animation.
The early stages of the Toy Story production have been characterized by the movie novices in the Pixar team yielding to the expertise of the Disney studio and especially the company’s powerful head, Jeffrey Katzenberg.
At the screening of the first half of film the consensus across both the Pixar and Disney teams is that the film is terrible. In working hard to placate Katzenberg and give the film an edge intended to ensure it would appeal to children, teenagers and adults, the Pixar team have lost sight of their own movie.
Even Woody, the central character, has turned into a complete jerk, too unlikeable to capture an audience’s emotions. Disney orders a shutdown of the production, threatening major layoffs. But Pixar founder and head of animation John Lasseter successfully pleads for a two-week reprieve. Extract from Superteams
The prospect of Toy Story collapsing proved to be a critical, crucible moment for the Pixar team. They had been working towards this, their first full-length computer animated movie, for years. Now all of that work was in jeopardy.
They launched themselves into a fortnight of hyper-intense activity, of physical and mental stress, all barriers down, dealing with the issues with brutal honesty.
The experience turned what was already a very good team into a great team, a Superteam. Pixar had already forged a shared vision of telling great stories through the medium of cutting edge technology.
The team – a self-styled ‘fraternity of geeks’ - harnessed the diverse talents and personalities of a Steve Jobs and a John Lasseter. 
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I didn’t hit a shot out there. My players all played magnificently, all twelve of them.’ Colin Montgomerie > To Ryder Cup team
‘“Who dares wins” is a way of life. It is living and breathing this motto that makes the SAS the best at what they do.’ Andy McNab > To SAS
‘Good enough is never going to be good enough. It sounds dramatic, but what we are doing in those early days is saving lives, and you are never ever going to be good enough.’ Mike Goodhand, Head of International Logistics, British Red Cross > To Red Cross
The Rolling Stones is a vehicle that only works when we put it in motion.’ Ronnie Wood > To Rolling Stones
Dialogue is crucial to any effort to find a solution to conflict.’ Gerry Adams > To Northern Ireland Peace Process
‘Ferrari is the myth of Formula 1. The tradition, the soul, the passion.’ Ayrton Senna > To Ferrari F1
YOUR AGENDA FOR BUILDING
A BETTER TEAM
A BETTER TEAM