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3 Obstacles to Producing High Talent Teams

Guest post by: Sylvia Lafair

Article Overview: Success is a team sport. In this era of connectedness the lone hero is a thing of the past. And yet, one person can make a difference in the success of a project, a division, a company. There are three major obstacles that must be considered when you lead a team or coordinate projects. They all are a combination of individual behaviors and how these behaviors react in a system of relationships.

3 Obstacles to Producing High Talent Teams

Success is a team sport. In this era of connectedness the lone hero is a thing of the past. And yet, one person can make a difference in the success of a project, a division, a company. There are three major obstacles that must be considered when you lead a team or coordinate projects. They all are a combination of individual behaviors and how these behaviors react in a system of relationships.

OBSTACLE 1: professional sabotage includes those individuals who feel threatened by talent. They will give the thumbs down to a new hire that may outshine them. The fear of being overshadowed keeps them in the land of choosing to hire mediocrity. They prefer weak and obsequious individuals who rarely speak out. They can usually come up with good reasons to hire average rather than outstanding.

OBSTACLE 2: pattern repetition that is not easily detected and yet once observed is not met with a willingness to change. We all have behavior patterns from childhood that follow us to work. These patterns need to grow up or they get in the way of creativity and problem solving. When patterns keep repeating they link with others and start a chain reaction. Most people are willing to make changes for their future success. Those who wont and don't drag teams of people down.

OBSTACLE 3: obsessive loyalty to the way things were. People are kept in the same jobs, offices look the way they did in past decades, and there is a tendency to live in a time warp. New is looked upon as frivolous. Old is tried and true. "Good enough" is the standard and by the time innovation is suggested, it is already outmoded. Those who point to better ways to work are soon out of work in companies that put loyalty to the past before loyalty to the future.

Producing highly talented teams is hard work. It means learning about the hidden aspects of personalities, the invisible loyalties that keep us stuck, the fears and betrayals that make us slide down the mountain before success is attained.

It takes serious concentration to ask probing questions, listen for pattern repetition, see if individuals and teams are aligned, touch on the reasons we tend to hold back from full disclosure of the truth, pick up the cues.

In "Don't Bring It to Work" there is an exercise; the CHI Exercise that helps put the spotlight on the obstacles so they can be tended to quickly and easily. This Career History Inventory has a series of questions that help you connect the dots of the behavior patterns that can get in the way of talented teams working together in the most powerful and productive manner.

If each individual on a team is willing to look at his or her weaknesses and strengths in the context of one's own personal life line and make decisions on what needs to be applauded and what needs to be strengthened or released the opportunity for an amazing once in a millennium group of people can come together and literally move mountains together.

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Article Tags: exercise, hero, obstacles, relationships, success, team sport



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