(This post was originally shared at Leading by DESIGN, where I’m a team member. It is written for our LEAD 365 alumni, although all are welcome to read it.)
Throughout our year together in LEAD 365, we focused on three “buckets” of leadership—three areas that great leaders need to focus on:
- Being a person worth following
- Creating clarity around purpose/mission, vision, and values
- Building a great team
In our building a great team sessions, we introduced you to a list of eight characteristics of great teams. Remember the details? No? The eight characteristics are what we believe the very best teams have, and what are necessary to build an amazing team. Here they are again to jog your memory:
- Common Goals
- Commitment (to the goals and to each other)
- Communication
- Trust
- Talent
- Knowledge of each other and of self
- Grace
- Chemistry
In LEAD 365, we spend maybe half an hour on this list. In the blog, we have more time and space to dive into each of these characteristics, how they impact a team, and how to build them in your teams. Over the next eight weeks, we will be writing about each of the characteristics in more depth to help you better understand why each characteristic makes our list, and to give you a chance to think about how your team is doing in each of these areas. Some teams excel at having the right talent mix, but fail miserably at giving each other grace. Other teams have great chemistry and really enjoy each other, but don’t have a clearly defined common goal, which can cause them to go off-track on a whim.
As we launch this series, we encourage you to think about the teams you are a part of. Would you say that they meet each of the eight characteristics on the list? If not, what needs to be strengthened? What in your team culture might need to change?
The next several weeks are designed to help you dig deep into understanding how to build a great team. We will kick off next week with a post on Common Goals. Until then, I hope you’ll spend some time this week thinking about what it might take to make your team great—if it’s not there already.
Lead on,
Meredith
Image by TheodoreWLee. Used under CC BY-ND 2.0 license.