TEAM: 3 Tools for Building The Best One

I’ll avoid as many corny lines as I can. But here’s the thing: our team is a little nutty, that’s who we look for, that’s what we hire for, and that’s how we work well.

Team building blocks:

Complete transparency, I’m simply cliff noting info from leadership greats like Patrick Lencioni and his great literature like below: (read it… seriously)

Teamwork 5 Dysfunctions

And at the end of this you will want to purchase this assessment for everyone in your company:

Working Genius Cart

A Free first step is the DISC assessment, which helps you understand the personalities of everyone on your team.

What to do with all of this?

If you didn’t already, read last month’s blog on ‘HOW TO HIRE‘.

Haven’t hired anyone lately?  This is useful information to determine if your company is well balanced to produce your best work.

Once you’ve hired a quality team member that will fit your culture (and hopefully you will need a few team members for your growing business).

Here are our steps, and I hope they help you:

1. Read Patrick’s book 5 dysfunctions of a Team (have everyone read it if possible)
2. Discuss what you thought of it with a mentor or your leadership (I’m always happy to chat about it as well)
3. Everyone in your company takes the DISC and/or Working Genius Tests linked above (make sure all new hires take them too)
4. Review the data and see how balanced it is.
5. Schedule a leadership or all-staff meeting based on your company size (ideally off-site like the book example) and go through these assessments to identify each person’s gifts and challenges.
6. Create another meeting in a couple of weeks if it seems that some space might be needed before proceeding.
7. As a unified leadership, review the conversations from the meeting and the charts from DISC and WIDGET (working genius) to identify gaps and lacks as well as strengths and top-heavy areas.
8. During the next meeting propose these ideas, and WHY you see this as necessary.
   • If everyone has received this new method, it should not only be well received, but exciting
   • Your staff more than likely will be energized and coming up with more ways to improve
   • Hopefully, people are willing to even shift their job position altogether once you’re on the same page.

The Right Seat on the Right Bus

Sometimes hiring fast is necessary, and you miss ideal job placements in the company. Periodically there should be performance reviews, not only concerned about ‘hitting your numbers’ but also about: Do you enjoy the company? Are you doing something that you enjoy? Is there anything else you wish you were doing?

A simple method is START, STOP, KEEP. (what should we START doing, STOP doing, and KEEP doing)

These types of questions dig into a veritable wealth of opportunities to build a team from within and create a unified organization that cannot be stopped!

Ultimately, this falls under Jim Collins’ concept of ‘The Bus”. If you have your best salesperson doing sales management now, perhaps you’ve moved them from the right seat to the wrong seat.

They worked great on the sales team, but maybe not so great at managing the team.

Perhaps the AR lead does not want to move towards a CFO track. Your receptionist might be your next bookkeeper in disguise.

The most important part of this process is to ASK questions of your team, and LISTEN to what they’re excited about!

Get started today!

If you’re reading this, my guess is you were interested because you lead a team.

The best way to lead is by example. So the real step is:

Read the book yourself.

Take the assessments yourself.

Apply the results to your thinking and check whether you think you are in the right seat, and on the right bus.

Happy Team Building!