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Three crucial things strong leaders do to build a great team
Building a great team is as crucial as having a great idea because it is always the team that implements the idea.
This is a user generated content for MyStory, a YourStory initiative to enable its community to contribute and have their voices heard. The views and writings here reflect that of the author and not of YourStory.
Every great leader follows certain steps to be successful. These steps can be effortful or natural. Those which come naturally were at some point always an effort that they were trying to adopt into their lives.
This means that every human being is capable of developing himself into a leader. You just need to know these stepping stones on which you can practice your walk and become a strong leader. The first and the most important stepping stone is building a great team. Without one, a leader can do nothing, no matter how great he or she is.
Leaders only become great when they can create and maintain a team greater than themselves. Because it’s always the team that does the work. As they say: The greatest leader is only as strong as the weakest member of his team.
Picking up on this let's see what can leaders do to build a strong team:
1. Understanding Employee Problems
When working as a leader it may become difficult for you to see things through the eyes of an employee. There are a lot of problems that teams face which managers are not aware of. These problems are often ignored just because of lack of communication between the team members and the manager.
It is the job of a leader to understand the troubles of the team members and then come out with solutions to deal with them. If ignored, these problems can result in causing stress and an imbalance within the team.
Some of these problems can be obvious like favoritism at workplace. Others not so, like wasting too much time on collaboration, inflexible work environment, too much micromanaging, inefficient work distribution, employee stress, handling personal growth of team members, managing employee conflicts to name a few.
The best thing that leaders can do is to tackle this issue is to get employee feedback. They should genuinely show an interest and work towards these issues with their employees. This kind of behaviour will help them create a stronger bond with the team.
2. Understanding Multidimensional Awareness
As a professional, working in teams, I have observed that unsuccessful leaders don’t spend time to understand how the core members of their team perform individual tasks. They are always busy in asking for things rather than understanding processes across various dimensions of the company. When projects fail they try to intervene, and waste their time and effort in understanding the processes from the start. That’s when conflicts arise.
Instead a good leader will always remain involved with his core team. He or she will make a personal effort to talk with each employee about how they carry their tasks.
Multidimensional awareness carries itself forward. You will also have to be a good mentor when trouble comes and let certain decisions be carried out by team members only. Because you know that sometimes it will be the team members who know better.
Remember, never to confuse multi-dimensional awareness with micro-managing. Great leadership is not about trying to manage everyone, all the time, it's also about creating more leaders. So, you need to put an effort in developing leaders from within your team and not just focus on micro-managing every move.
3. Understand Personality Types Within Team
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Human nature is always driven by a strong inner motive. There are a total of 4 motives that drive every human personality. These are:
Power, Love, Peace and Pleasure. Below I list the traits of each personality type and how you need to deal with them to build a strong team.
Power:
Those who crave power always want an upper hand. So, it will be hard for you to make them understand what other people mean, because they will always be too focused on explaining their point of view. This makes them hard to control. To deal with them you will need patience.
A major turn off for power hungry people will be doing things to fill an emotional void. They will be practical as hell. So, if you want them to be nice to their co-workers you may have to struggle harder.
Love:
Those who crave love will always want to do nice things for others. Their driving motive will be selfless help. These are the one’s who will need appreciation from time to time, for the things that they do for others. They will also become emotionally attached with projects. The best thing about them will be their trustworthiness.
Frankly speaking, love hungry people are the ones that should be put on leadership roles in organizations. Great leaders will know their importance and will give them leadership roles even if they don't have the required skill.
Peace:
Diligent, quite, hardworking, stubborn and non confrontational. These are words that describe people with peace as an inner motive. Peace loving people hate those things that disrupt the peace within their minds. This is one reason they will avoid getting into conflicts or confront tough situations.
A major turnoff for them will be rudeness. If they sense rudity, even when there is none, they will form a strong wall of passive resistance or stubbornness to stick with their own views. If you want to get work out of them be as nice to them as possible and they will always oblige.
Pleasure:
People with pleasure as an inner motive are fun loving. They live a carefree life and those around them are always happy to have them in their company. They make every serious task as fun as possible. Because of their fun loving nature people like to listen and follow what they have to say.
They also prove to be great leaders because of their ability to keep the team united and keep things light.
Conclusion
Finally, as a leader you can play many roles like you can be a manager, a boss, a team leader or a captain. A point will come where every leader will eventually need to step on the ladder of building a great team. The above three steps will be crucial to your success no matter where you are. And if you adopt them you will finally be on your road to building a great team.
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