A team isn’t just a group of people who happen to work together.
And leading a team isn’t just about setting goals and pulling together individuals’ work.
A good team is one that performs at a high level, consistently. They see their work — and often the day-to-day team leadership — as shared. Most importantly, their collective output is greater than the sum of the team’s parts.
Good managers can make team leadership look easy. But in reality, the skill of building teams requires us, at the very least, to:
- model team effectiveness
- create emotional safety
- foster team culture
- give genuinely influential feedback.
Why is it useful?
Team leaders rarely get to choose all of the team’s members. Yet we’re responsible for seeing that those members deliver quality group outputs to deadlines every day of the week — and in increasingly competitive, complex and pressurised work contexts.
The question is: how can you build an existing team into high-performance powerhouse? People aren’t machines; every day is different for every team member, team, and workplace. And work is just one part of an individual’s life.
For any leader or would-be leader, the skill of building teams is critical to career development. But it’s also central to enjoying your daily work.
Make today the day you start to grow the skill of building teams.
