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Team Building

Your Success as a Team Leader Relies on Focusing on the Positive

Negativity surrounds us.  The news and media are negative.  Statistically the majority of the people around you are negative.  It’s difficult to get away from, even when you try.  But that’s what a successful manager must do if they want to build a productive team.  Stop focusing on what team members do wrong.  Stop focusing on your mistakes and what you do wrong.  Instead, target your attention on what is going right, what they do well and what everyone enjoys doing the most.  When you do, improved team results begin to show up and you find yourself having fun, enjoying your job and those you work with – and goals are being achieved at the same time.  WooHoo!
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Transcript: Team Building

Welcome everyone to the Manager Mojo podcast.  Today’s topic is Team Building.

Now, I have to tell you that I really struggled with the idea of team building when I first became a manager. Maybe you felt like me — Team building?  Is that really in my job description?

I think most of the time I’m not the exception.  Many times managers believe their job is not really team building.   I thought it was more managing my team then actually building anything.  I didn’t feel like I was constructing anything.   I felt that my job was to push people.  I wasn’t in the business of pulling people up, I was in the job of pushing them to get the result that we needed on the team.   So I was really a tough, tough boss because I didn’t have an appreciation of what my role was.

In addition to pushing all the time, I thought a manager’s job was to monitor what people were doing, like a hall monitor in school.  Are you doing what you’re supposed to be doing?  I almost thought my job was to catch them doing something that they shouldn’t have been doing.  In my defense, I’d actually seen that demonstrated early in my life.

When I was a teenager I worked for a man who had an amazing energy and a successful business.  I observed what he was doing and he would all of a sudden appear in the department and be checking to see if people were doing what they were supposed to be doing.  Or were they were goofing off?   And it worked.

He was constantly catching people at stuff. He’d read them the riot act and everybody would get busy again.  It wasn’t until many years later I realized that what he had really been doing was setting us up to be lazy and not do our jobs.  We were watching to see if he was coming or not, instead of simply being motivated to do really great work.

So I had this bias that I should be monitoring other people’s activity and viewing the metrics, and making sure the team’s goals were being met.   After all,  I was responsible for those team goals.   It didn’t occur to me that I should be working differently and trying to build up people’s strengths.  That concept was so foreign to me that I couldn’t even relate to it.  It may be foreign to you too.

What I was really saying is that I didn’t know how to build up a team.  I didn’t even know where to start.  It actually took me a long time to discover how to begin to do it.   Maybe you’re just like me in that regard and you’re lost.  You don’t know where the starting point is.  You know you are supposed to build a team, but you really don’t know where to start, or how in the world you are going to build anything.   Do it’s important for us to first talk about what this thing called ‘team building’ is, and then I’ll give you a few tips on where to start.

Team building should be the most important thing you do as a manager and leader.   As the manager of the team, if we have the mindset that our job is to improve everyone’s results on the team, then naturally the results of the whole team are going to be better.   I had to learn by trial and error that was really the way to get outstanding results.

Here are some symptoms that you don’t know what team building is –

If you find yourself saying ‘I’d be meeting the goals, I’d be a top manager, if I had that guy’s team members.’   Maybe they do have better talent, but the reality is that you’re making an excuse that you need their team in order to get better results.  The fact is, you might screw up that team. You might get less result with them than that manager.  You don’t really know.

Yet, I found myself doing that very thing.  At first, I was saying to myself ‘Hey, I could achieve that if I just had that person on my team, or that person on my team, or that person on my team.’   Basically, I had an attitude of griping about the very people I was supposed to be working with everyday to help them improve.  I really was not committed to them.  I was committed to myself.  I hope that you can appreciate that. When you are focused on yourself instead of others, then there’s no place for ‘team’ in that.

And yet, I think most of us do that because we’re insecure about getting the results that we’re being held to.   We struggle with trying to figure it out.   We wonder what we should be doing.  It’s easier to blame someone else than figure out what you, yourself, have to do.

When a manager understands that if they actually build up each member of their team and they are able to help each person on the team improve, think about the logic of that making the entire team’s results improve.  Everybody’s improving.  Well, what do you think your results are going to be on your team?  That’s right, every bit of your team is going to improve, your numbers are going to improve, your self-image is going to improve and more importantly, the team members’ self-images are going to improve.

This should be a major focus of what we do.  I realize that it’s hard to do that when all over the management world we see demonstrated people who really don’t care about the team. They care about themselves and what they’re being held accountable to. And if no one is telling you how to do this effectively, you either learn it by accident like I did or you get tuned in, like you are today, to someone who can help.

If you have been thinking, ‘Wow, I can relate to this because I’ve really had the same struggles myself.  I’m constantly comparing my team to somebody else’s team and wishing I was lucky enough to get those kinds of people,’ that’s not the right way to be thinking.  Be willing to look honestly at your team and to do some evaluations.  Let’s talk about how we can do that.

Here’s the first thing I recommend you do.  Honestly evaluate the strengths of each person on your team.  Make a list of what each person is good at. Start listing their strengths.  Don’t start from the negative standpoint, because if you do you’ll be challenged to find anything that they’re good at.  You’ll have been focusing on their weaknesses so much that you’ll become blind to what a person’s really good at.  I would challenge you to write down each person’s name on a piece of paper and write down what they do great.  What do they do well?

Start making a list, and when you do it helps to give a specific example where you have observed that behavior. That helps to program your brain to begin remembering.

Let me give you an example. What if you have a team member who is always on time?  In fact, they aren’t just on time, but they’re five or ten minutes early and they’re always ready to go to work.  They arrive on time and they get started with their job. That is a strength, because it is something you don’t have to worry about.   They are just going to do it.  So, list that strength and write down those specific instances.

Here is another thing you might look at as an example of a strength.   What if you have someone who is really good at handling hard situations or tough situations?  Think about how they do that and write it as a strength.  Before you know it, you’re going to find that your team members have a lot more strengths than you’ve recognized because you’ve been blinded by the negative world that we live in.

I would encourage you, as much as humanly possible, to not listen to the news of the day before you go into work with your team.  Just ignore it.  Let me tell you why.

If you look at the media about today in the news, what you’re going to find is they focus everything on what’s bad in the world.  If you fill your mind with all this negative junk before you go into work and you’re supposed to lead a team of people that you are encouraging and building up, you’ve got a lot of negativity in your brain before you’ve gotten to work.   You’re in trouble, and your team will be in trouble.   That’s not going to help you, and that’s not going to help them.

Start from strengths, not from weaknesses.  Now, am I saying ignore their weaknesses?  No, I’m saying you go back after you’ve evaluated their strengths and list what you consider to be their weakness. But the initial focus has got to be on their strengths.  Here’s why.  If somebody is already good at something and you’re helping them increase that strength, then guess what, they’re going to get better.

Look at it from a physical exercise perspective for a moment, if that would help you.  If you lift weights, it’s proven that you will continue to get stronger.   Let’s say you start out with a five pound dumbbell.  When you were doing a curl that’s all you could handle at first and then they were like nothing.  So what do you do?  You get a ten pound dumbbell and start doing curls.  The next thing you know, that is easy to do too.

You see, if we start with something they are already good at and help them build that strength, if they are encouraged and trained and given opportunities to exercise that strength, it is going to grow.  I promise you, people get the job done by utilizing their strengths, not their weaknesses. We have to figure out a way that each person can utilize their strengths and develop them in order to get better.

 

If you’ll start team building by going through this exercise, I know it’s going to help you and your team.

Far too many managers spend the majority of their time trying to manage around their teams’ weaknesses and they’re continually harping on somebody’s weakness.  Maybe a certain person doesn’t do that one thing well and it just irritates you.   What do you do?  You are constantly irritating that employee about the weakness, and before long you have lost their respect because you’re trying to change that weakness.  That’s not the best way to approach it.

Would there be a way that you could utilize one of their existing strengths to get the same result, but not have to worry about that weakness so much?  That’s your challenge and as the manager of the team, you should take that challenge on and help people overcome what is perceived as a weakness.  Instead, build those muscles up, build those strengths up.

The last thing I want to talk to you about regarding strength building is that when you’ve evaluated somebody’s strengths; develop a plan for each person on your team. Develop a plan using those strengths and develop that plan as it fits in your team objectives.

I’ll give you an example of where I’ve used it very successfully. I had a couple of team members who were really terrific at planning contests, rewards and incentives for the team.  You know those fun things that you do just to have a good time.  I had a couple of people who were outstanding at that.  I had ten other people who were horrible at it (and they also didn’t like to do it).   Well, what would be the point of giving that responsibility to those people who were horrible at it when I had two people who were outstanding?   People will tell you that you need to work on building their weakness because they need to overcome that ‘lack.’    That’s actually not very efficient.

The fact is they probably will never be good at it because they don’t like planning those things, and at the end of the day that’s not the essential part of their job.    I suggest you look for somebody who has that strength and utilize it.  Now, does that mean you couldn’t put one of those people who weren’t great at incentive building with one of those two good people?  No. You would do that and let them participate with those who were great at it, but you would designate the strong ones as being the lead in that project.  Guess what?  The person who is not good will learn from observing somebody who is, and the next thing you know you’ve built up your team.

This is a tough subject and one that we could dive into a lot deeper than we can on today’s podcast.  Hopefully this has helped you today.

I also want you to know that I created the Mojo Leadership System training program to dive in and give you specific ways to build your team.  Team building is one of the modules in the course, and it would help you to become a more confident manager and a more competent leader.  You would begin to build people to take advantage of their strengths.

So, team building, team building, team building — make it a focus for you and your team this week and you’ll begin to see your own strengths grow as you begin to look at what other people are great at.

Thanks for joining me today.  Focus on the positive.  Build a great team!