Day 8 – What is a good team and how do you build one?

Action Steps

Answer this question – What makes a great team?

Session Transcript

Lily: What does it mean to have a good team and how would you build one?

Michael: Again, I can really just share for our team. We’re trying to create the team within our own organization that we’re helping other teams to create as well. Sometimes, organizations and leaders and teams are able to do that. Sometimes, they’re not able to really get there.

For us, our leadership team, is almost all Millennials which is unusual. We have three Gen-Xers and then we have the rest Millennials in our team. They’re about collaboration and they want their time to be flexible and they want us to engage in personal goals that they have, and so, we’ve just made that a part of what we do.

In fact, whenever anybody is added to our team, we ask them this question, we ask them, “What does success look like for you?” and we do it with everybody else in the team there, we write it out in the white board and then we have a common document that has what success looks like for each one of us individually. And then we also have on that document what success looks like as a team. I think that’s a great exercise for every team to go through to understand what personal and work success looks like for each team member. We’re engaged in not only helping our team members accomplish what they want to accomplish in their role, but we’re engaged in helping them accomplish what they want to outside of work; in their personal life.

We have one of our team members that wants to do equestrian eventing, and they want to compete at a high-level. Well, that has nothing to do with our mission, our vision as an organization. But, we’ve allocated space to them at the retreat and we’ve allocated time to them in order to pursue that for themselves. And I could tell, we have things like that for every single person in our team, we’re helping them accomplish things that they want to accomplish personally so I think it’s really important.

I think that second thing that I would say for anybody who’s part of a team or considering to be part of a team, is to understand, “Do you work with a team or do you work with a family?” That’s a great question, I think Mark Miller was also the one that said that to me. See, a team is results-oriented. A family, if you don’t hit the mark, you’re still going to be family. Now, there might be a conversation but you’re not going to get fired from a family.

A team puts up with less drama and less things than a family. There’s all kinds of analogies that you could draw there; a lot of good articles have been written on that as well. So, understanding what your team is. For us, we have a little bit of a blend. We are results-oriented, but we also want people to be healthy, holistically healthy, and so we try to help them do that.[/text_block]