A Great Leader Builds a Great Team—Part 3, You’ve Hired Great People, Now What?

By George McQuain

The last two entries in this series discussed some practical ways that you can identify and hire great people to be on your team. We looked beyond “experience” to address a process for hiring people with the attributes and attitudes that would lead to success in the position you are filling and at three crucial attributes (humility, tenacity and a willingness to learn) that are very valuable in a team member.

In this entry, we are going to examine taking those great people you’ve hired and building them into a great team.

It is unlikely that a single individual will excel in all the areas that are needed to make a team great. It is also impossible for a team leader to be everywhere, do everything, take every decision, and be involved in every interaction that leads to her or his team winning and being great. As a result, the ultimate test for a great leader is not whether he or she makes smart decisions and takes decisive action, but whether he or she teaches others to be leaders and builds an organization that can sustain its success even when he or she is not around.

As I said in the first post in this series:

Throughout my career, I have noticed an interesting pattern. I have observed that great leaders have surrounded themselves with great people, while mediocre leaders have not. This observation poses an interesting “chicken or the egg” question: Do great leaders create great teams or do great teams create great leaders?

Actually, this question, in my opinion, is not an “either/or” question, it is an “and” observation that should be restated as “Great leaders create great teams and great teams create great leaders”.

To get the ball rolling, a great leader can start the process of creating a great team by taking people, and by challenging them and creating a connection with them, unleash their potential to achieve extraordinary results. He or she shouldn’t just accept people as they are; they need to see their co-workers’ potential and care enough to push them past self-imposed limitations to realize that potential. This also involves ensuring that your team pursues a set of shared goals.

The most effective way for a leader to do these things is to build and sustain effective relationships with her/his teammates and to ensure both learning and teaching on the part of everyone on the team (including him or herself). Said another way, the leader must create a two way learning process and the development of leaders in every position on the team they are leading.

This is neither a top-down nor a bottom-up approach to leadership. It is a “Side by Side” approach.

In his book Side by Side Leadership: Achieving Outstanding Results Together, Dennis Romig points out that often the most effective way for leaders to influence others is to "change their own behavior." Romig’s model recognizes that leadership involves facilitating and coordinating a two-way influence process. Not managing in top-down or bottom-up manner.

Such leadership is mutual, interactive, and shared. It involves getting to know your individual team members, letting them get to know you, learning from one another, understanding one another’s goals and the vision and goals of the team, and expecting one another to do the right thing in pursuit of the team’s goals.

Some of the action steps of this approach are:

1.   Foster two-way communication, participation and cooperation in an adult to adult manner. Remember that both you and your co-workers have a lot riding on your team’s success. You must be open and honest with one another.

2.   Mutually create a vision that elevates and transforms the meaning of your team’s efforts. People seek significance. Work together to make your team’s work significant.

3.   Actively encourage new ideas to improve quality and profitability. Do NOT rely on the proverbial “Suggestion Box”. Engage your co-workers in an active discussion of improvement ideas. Expect this from one another.

4.   Involve your team in setting goals, developing plans and implementing the plan. People are more likely to work to achieve something if they are involved in what that “something” is. People generally react negatively to “change” because it is often forced upon them.

5.   Use your knowledge, skills, experience and leadership to work with your team to prioritize goals, plans and ideas. You can’t do everything all the time. Focus on what’s important.

6.   Create workplace ownership by explicitly allowing team members to affect positive change and best service customers in ways that are in alignment with your team’s vision and goals.

7.   Make sure that your team has the resources it needs to win.

Leaders who build great teams involve their team members in that building process and they take direct responsibility for the development of every person on their team as leaders. Through mutual and continuous learning, both the leader and the team will continue to improve and win.