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Is Your Management Team REALLY a Team

Guest post by: Dr. Rick Johnson

Article Overview: Creating a Culture of teamwork requires leadership being able to interact with employees, peers and many other individuals both inside and outside the organization. Leaders must gain the support of many people to meet or exceed established objectives. This means that they must develop or possess a unique understanding of people. The ability to coach-mentor and teach leadership skills to others is the driving force that will create a winning organization. It is the driving force that can bring those employees that are outliers, those that are skeptical of management into a team environment.

Is Your Management Team REALLY a Team

Creating a Culture of teamwork requires leadership being able to interact with employees, peers and many other individuals both inside and outside the organization. Leaders must gain the support of many people to meet or exceed established objectives. This means that they must develop or possess a unique understanding of people. The ability to coach-mentor and teach leadership skills to others is the driving force that will create a winning organization. It is the driving force that can bring those employees that are outliers, those that are skeptical of management into a team environment.

Creating an effective management team requires an understanding of the principles that govern employee behavior. The ability to understand difficult or nonresponsive team members is a prerequisite to the creation of a culture based on unity and solidarity. Accomplish that and you will have a real management team.

Communication a Critical Component

Effective communication is the breath of life, the first spark to ignite success. Nothing else is so crucial to creating an effective management team that has the ability to grow the business.

True leaders inspire others to greatness. Inspiring your team starts by taking that first step to really understand who they are, what they are about and the principles they stand for. Effective face to face communication is your platform to provide that inspiration. It is a platform to build trust amongst your management team members.

The achievement of trust enables your management team to reach deep down and give their all despite difficult circumstances. To be effective and trustworthy, a manager has to be willing to admit where they have failed and identify their imperfections as areas for their own personal development. Admitting and identifying such issues regarding one's self further fosters trust and demonstrates to teammates that you are human and that you don't have all of the answers.

Set Ego Aside

We all have egos but effective leaders control their own egos and understand how to utilize their understanding of people to inspire peak performance. They are confident and have high self esteem without demonstrating arrogance. They are not only compassionate but they are passionate about success and they make every effort to create an effective management team. They have the unique ability to communicate and demonstrate exceptional listening skills.

Empowerment is a common trait used by most effective leaders in developing their management team. The rewards of empowering your management team are far greater than the risk. Empowerment allows them to use their own initiative and creativity to accomplish things you never imagined they could. It is a baseline for building a really effective management team.

It's Your Responsibility

Building an effective management team is a primary responsibility of leadership. Understanding the team you have put in place to help you run the business is not a luxury. It is a responsibility you must accept as a leader. Every one of us is a human being with different values, different beliefs, different back rounds and different views. Ask yourself; "how can you possibly be an effective leader without a complete understanding of every one of your team members?"

Follow these ten tips to make your team really a team.

1. Create an intentional communication strategy. Your Management team must understand and support a common vision. This requires clarity. Clarity begins with effective communication. Make sure communication from your Management team reaches all employees.

2. Do not set up intentional competition in the workplace. Try to insure that individual skill sets complement one another rather than compete with one another. Spread the responsibility and authority around by alternating leaders for various tasks. Look for star potential and introduce coaching & mentoring as a skill set.

3. Create team ownership in the decision making process but it's not management by committee. Avoid group think by making sure that individuals express opinions openly without intimidation. Responsibility must be accompanied by authority and accountability.

4. Build trust and respect by giving trust and respect. Act as a coach or mentor and not a boss.

5. Create off site team building activities quarterly. Social gatherings, athletic activities, laser tag or other activities that build unification and trust in each other.

6. Don't just talk about empowerment and delegation, believe in it and demonstrate that belief by allowing the team members to make decisions and take independent action.

7. Take complex plans and strategies and assign accountability and ownership. This creates more efficiency and leverages creativity. Assign responsibility according to individual passions.

8. Brainstorming must be encouraged to release team innovation. Bouncing ideas off one another stimulates creative thinking which leads to creative solutions. This in itself bonds individuals into a common purpose.

9. Ask for solutions assigning both responsibility and empowerment. Ownership of ideas and initiatives builds commitment. Involving the team in creating direction and solutions through empowerment generates commitment to the tasks necessary to meet objectives.

10. Challenge your management team. Reliance on team effectiveness minimizes risk by being more flexible and adaptive than relying on a single individual. No one individual alone can jeopardize success. The loss of one team member can be overcome without losing sight of the objectives.

A leader has to win the hearts and minds of his management team if they are to perform like a highly effective team. This doesn't happen by accident. It depends on values, beliefs that create the foundation for how the team works together. It is imperative that the leader understands these values and beliefs. They may be unspoken and linger at the subconscious level but they do affect individual attitudes. That is where the leader's communication skills become critical.

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Article Tags: driving force, leadership skills, management team, organization leaders, team environment, teamwork



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