The sign of a professional is someone who makes the difficult look easy. This can be said in many walks of life. It can also be said of leaders. Have you ever seen a leader who was able to bring out the best from every member of his or her organization and make it appear effortless? I have…
We is Better Than Me
Teams outperform individuals in virtually every situation. This fact has not escaped the attention of most leaders. What has been more elusive is the winning formula for creating great teams. The good news, there is a repeatable and predictable formula for building High Performance Teams.
Today's Challenge: Building a High Performance Team
Over the last year, I’ve written more than two dozen posts on teams. As some of you know, I’ve also written a book entitled The Secret of Teams about the lessons we’ve learned over the last two decades here at Chick-fil-A on our team journey. Today, I want to summarize the best practices of building a high performance team, in a top 10 format.
Is This As Good As It Gets?
The team journey is not easy. There are many moments when emerging teams want to call it quits. However, if your team has been diligent, disciplined and patient, there will come a point when you realize it’s working – the team is actually accomplishing things together. What’s next?
Is Your Team in the Dungeon?
I usually think about, talk about, study and write about teams that excel. My book, The Secret of Teams, is about creating High Performance Teams. However, I’ve been looking at this topic long enough to know - some teams stink.
Is Your Team Really a Team?
How’s the performance of your team? Are there days when you wonder if you’re accomplishing anything together? One of the problems some teams have is the assumption they are a team… when they aren’t. Although the determining factors of whether a team is really a team are many, one measure is the output of the team.
Today's Challenge: Culture as Competitive Advantage
Lately, I’ve noticed an emerging trend - more and more leaders are talking about the importance of culture. I recently attended a seminar hosted by John Maxwell where he commented, “Culture trumps everything.” If that’s true, today’s challenge should be of interest to leaders everywhere. How do you create a vibrant culture?
Why Project Teams Fail
After more than three decades of studying and participating on project teams, I believe there is really a short list of reasons so many of these teams fail. Sometimes it's a leadership issue on the team, sometimes it's a resource question and in some situations, the team will fail because of outside factors beyond their control. But there is one reason that towers above all the others…
The Cross-functional Team Advantage
I’ve been a baseball fan my entire life. I started playing the game when I was 5 or 6 years old – a little late by today’s standards. I’ve played on good teams and bad, but I’ve never seen a successful team with nine second basemen. That’s the analogy I use when I see teams that lack diversity – specifically functional diversity.
5 Things High Performance Teams Do
Last week, I wrote about the critical role of the team leader in a high performance team. The question often emerges, “So what does the team do?” The correct answer: it depends. It depends on the purpose of the team, their composition, their competency, their level of maturity, etc. However, you can often find some common behaviors in the best teams. I’ve written more extensively about this in my book, The Secret of Teams. For today’s post, here’s my top five list.
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