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Team Excellence Second Ingredient - The Right People

Guest post by: Robert Whipple

Article Overview: Having the right people on a team is fundamental to top performance. Too often we take for granted the players we are given for a team regardless of whether they are right for it or not. That is a mistake. This article describes a process to remove the wrong players.

Team Excellence Second Ingredient - The Right People

High performing teams do not just happen. They are planned and built in a way that optimizes performance. Numerous ingredients go in to making up a high performing team. I will outline several of these factors in separate articles in order to emphasize the particular item and highlight how to get it.

Getting the right people on the team is important and often difficult to achieve. We all know that having one or two duds on a team can bring down the performance of everyone. Yet we don't always have the luxury of selecting the optimum mix of people for a particular team. The makeup of the group is some combination of happenstance, historical norms, luck, planning, nurturing, political pressure, and simply who is available.

Getting the right resources is not an exact science, because there are various ways to measure the fit of an individual for a specific team assignment. If there is an excellent fit, it is pretty obvious. If the fit is OK but not perfect, it will need some work. If there is a total misfit, that is obvious as well.

Working in the team environment, it is important to immediately recognize the misfit and work to get that person replaced somehow. Jim Collins in his book Good To Great calls this getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus. Once you have done that, some serious team building and shaping of everyone will help knit the team together.

Getting someone off the team who is going to hold back performance sounds like an onerous task, but it does not have to be. Think of it this way, if someone is going to be a drag on the group, he or she is going to be unhappy and frustrated. Having the person see that it is in his or her best interest to step off the team is the first step, but you need to go further. You need to help the person make a graceful exit where there is no long term damage to the person's reputation. Sometimes that means calling in a favor in another area to get this person an individual contributor role. Other times it may mean actually helping to find this person another job. The key is to genuinely do this replacement in the spirit of helping this misfit be more successful. That way the person exits the team with an attitude of gratitude. That makes all the difference in the world.

Once you have the right players on the team it is time to do some serious team building so the trust is built up. That will be the topic of another segment.

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Article Tags: Bus, Collins, goals, Ingredients, Maslow, people, Teams



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