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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Agree your definition of victory. If everyone in your team shares the same specific understanding of what success looks like, when you shout ‘Go’ everyone will move in the same direction towards the same target. In sports winning and losing is usually clear-cut. The challenge for all teams is targeting the same level of clarity.
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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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Build the plan for your team together. Doing itas a team will help you get the most out of your team. You can draw on their diverse experiences, expertise and perspectives to build accuracy and robustness. In addition, involving the team engages them and fosters commitment to the purpose and plan.
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Keep focused and keep flexible. It’s like sailing: the team’s common purpose is the north star, the fixed point for navigating. To reach the destination the team needs to tack continuously to make progress. You cannot fight the winds of changing circumstances; you need to adapt and work with them.
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Constant communication of the common purpose sustains momentum over the inevitable bumps in the road. Forget mouse mats with inspirational slogans. This is all about making purpose a vibrant, continuous conversation amongst team members. Reinforce the message of common purpose and remind the team about it as often as possible.
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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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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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Focus on those who fit your team’s purpose. Finding the right talent for your team is not a popularity contest about who has the most friends. Selection is the laser focus of separating the talent you need from everyone else. An effective common purpose will attract the talent you need and repel those who lack the right stuff.
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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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Keep teams as small as the mission allows. As teams grow so too does the challenge of co-ordinating them, getting agreement and building cohesion. Where team size is an option, less will deliver more. Smaller teams make it easier to forge common purpose, build bonds between members and choreograph collaboration.
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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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Be flexible within a framework. Team structure will give you the platform for your team’s performance. But note Keith Richards’ view of a song: as a coathanger he can hang a different shirt on every time he plays. Structure should form the basis, not the barrier, to improvisation and teamwork.
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Control the controllables. So much in a team’s environment is beyond their control. Focus their energy on those elements they can affect, no matter how small. Being obsessive and detailed in preparation, improving tiny aspects here and there, has a cumulative impact that can add up to a winning edge.
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Focus on resources that are fit for purpose. Time, information, the right equipment and financial capital – resources are always in short supply. Prioritize, ruthlessly, the resources vital to your team’s progress. Shed any excess baggage. If in doubt, investing in the right people and their resourcefulness is the most effective way to secure the assets needed to succeed.
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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 through competence. Team members earn trust when they can show off their skills, demonstrate that they are masters of their task and prove their competence to contribute to the team’s purpose. You can turbocharge trust-building by focusing on quick wins that build teammates’ trust in each other’s capabilities.
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Earn trust through reliability. Team members earn trust when they deliver on their promises. That can be as simple as turning up on time. Your own ability to remain consistent and reliable under pressure and through testing times will be the biggest determinant of how much your team trusts you.
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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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Neutralize fears. Fight or flight is the first instinctive response to any potential threat of loss, whether actual or perceived. When your team is set against itself and divided by internal conflict you have first to defuse fears and reassure both sides before you can begin to move forward together.
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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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Keep things civil. The difference between a plan being branded ‘ill-conceived’ and a teammate being called ‘stupid’ is what separates teams that work from teams that don’t. Conflict about ideas are productive and conflict that is personal is destructive. Like a boxing referee, you should remind your team to keep the fight clean.
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Keep talking and, even better, keep listening. Balance how much you advocate your position with listening and inquiry, to better understand others’ perspectives. You need to actively encourage different opinions and allow them to be heard and understood, even if those opinions are uncomfortable and ones that you disagree with.
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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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Start with what’s working and what isn’t. The first step in improving your team is to determine where the team currently is. Feedback based on good data is essential to help your team face up to reality. This baseline will help you build the case for change and provide the basis for diagnosing what needs to change.
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Design the future together. The most powerful source of developing and executing new ideas and approaches for improving your team is . . . your team. Involving them ensures any change is not just theoretical but practicable. Getting your team to generate ideas also increases its ownership of the changes.
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Teams learn best by doing things together. Your team needs to rehearse the revised approach, again and again, until it becomes second nature. The fastest way of getting your team to adopt a new way of behaving is for them to experience directly the real benefits of the changed approach.
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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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THE RED CROSS IN HAITI
Cause and co-ordination
‘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
4.53 p.m. local time, Tuesday, 12 January 2010, Haiti
Registering a magnitude of 7.3 on the Richter scale, and with an epicentre only 25 kilometres west of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, the Haiti earthquake of 2010 leaves an immediate, devastating toll: an estimated 200,000 people dead, another 300,000 injured, a quarter of a million buildings flattened or dangerously damaged, a million and a half Haitians rendered homeless.
In response to the need for humanitarian assistance, the Red Cross and Red Crescent immediately move to action, activating specialist emergency relief units from around the world and launching fund-raising efforts.
At St Pierre Square in Petionville, a small suburb east of Port-au-Prince, Haitian National Red Cross Society volunteers quickly establish a first-aid station in a garage beneath the mayor’s office and start treating hundreds of survivors who are shocked and dazed, many with open head wounds or crushed and broken bones.
‘It’s not the best place, but people are coming and we are caring for them,’ says Rita Aristide, a veteran Haitian Red Cross volunteer. Extract from Superteams
In the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, the British Red Cross had swung into immediate action: the first meeting of their core team – the Society Action Team – took place a couple of hours later. Already information was being assessed, relief teams assembled, key decisions made.
This was full-on disaster management, bringing order and organization to a situation on the ground of chaos and confusion.
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The success of the Red Cross’s response was down to the work done year in year out on creating procedures, guidelines and training, developing an apparatus of personnel and equipment able to be mobilised at short notice, from rescue teams and medical staff to volunteers in high street shops collecting money.
This was full-on disaster management, bringing order and organization to a situation on the ground of chaos and confusion.
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The success of the Red Cross’s response was down to the work done year in year out on creating procedures, guidelines and training, developing an apparatus of personnel and equipment able to be mobilised at short notice, from rescue teams and medical staff to volunteers in high street shops collecting money.
All are inspired by the common cause of helping fellow human beings, but being good is not good enough alone: the professionalism of the team is vital.
The earthquake demonstrated the Red Cross’ ability to connect many different individual acts needed in responding to an emergency;
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from the donation of second hand clothes, harnessing Facebook and Twitter to communicate with donors, coordinating with the scores of other national red cross societies, and critically to saving lives and offering relief to those in desperate need on the ground in Haiti.
The British Red Cross showed how teamwork can organise and amplify these individual acts of humanity into a powerful community of purpose.
The earthquake demonstrated the Red Cross’ ability to connect many different individual acts needed in responding to an emergency;
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from the donation of second hand clothes, harnessing Facebook and Twitter to communicate with donors, coordinating with the scores of other national red cross societies, and critically to saving lives and offering relief to those in desperate need on the ground in Haiti. The British Red Cross showed how teamwork can organise and amplify these individual acts of humanity into a powerful community of 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 > To Pixar
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
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
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