How to Maximize the Strength of Your Team to Prepare for Growth

June 2, 2009 - PRLog -- A great sports team is only as good as its individual players working as a team, and according to the CEO of world’s leading business coaching company, the same can be said for a great company.

“Selecting the right people is just the beginning of building a successful team for your business,” ActionCOACH founder and CEO Brad Sugars says. “However, you cannot simply expect that your team alone will transform your business without a certain level of leadership and guidance to a common goal, objective or result.”

According to Sugars, great team building begins with a number of essential steps.

“Everything first starts with a company’s overall culture,” Sugars says. “And if the culture isn’t set at the top, the employees will step in and do it for an owner. It’s like all the great championship sports teams in recent memory – they all have strong team cultures built around team work and accountability. It’s the same with business. Company culture drives results.”

In addition, Sugars offers six critical elements that must be in place to create strong and effective company teams to get results:
1) Strong leadership
“Tom Landry, the former coach of the Dallas Cowboys, said, ‘leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence, seeing how you react. If you're in control, they're in control,’” Sugars says. “It’s critical that an owner take a leadership role with the team and provide clear direction and guidance.”

Strong leadership requires creating a working environment that encourages the cooperation of all team members. By encouraging and inspiring the team, the team in turn will inspire and encourage customers.

Sugars adds the ultimate goal of strong leadership is to maximize the “discretionary effort” that team members provide to meet team or company goals. That's the extra effort people provide – if they want to.

“They need both incentives and direction, as too often employees will do just what they have to do in order to get by,” he says.

Sugars notes the best-selling business book “Good to Great,” in which author Jim Collins identifies common leadership elements that top performing organizations have in place to allow them to tap into this wealth of discretionary effort.

“The most important element is what Collins calls ‘Level 5 leadership,’” Sugars says. “While these leaders have the ability to motivate their teams to pursue a clear and compelling vision and generate higher performance, they also demonstrate a unique blend of personal humility and professional will as they lead from the front to create the discretionary effort from all team members.”

Another important element is the "the window and the mirror" concept to both protect and energize the leader's team. When things were going well, Level 5 leaders look out the “window” and credit their team for the success; when things are going poorly they look in the “mirror” and take the responsibility for poor performance.

2) Common goals
Teams need to understand what their common business goals are and those goals need to supersede all individual goals. Sports teams provide an excellent example of this concept.

“If the team understands that a common goal is to win the championship, then it will be easier for all team members to focus and concentrate on the team goal,” Sugars says. “If one or more team members are focused on individual goals, such as winning the scoring title, the performance of the entire team can be negatively affected.”

Business is similar in this respect. If the salesperson is just focused on bringing in orders regardless of the cost to produce and ship that order, the common goal of maximizing profit will be at risk.

“Everything – including common goals for the business – starts with the owner's vision,” Sugars says. “This must be regarded as the central aim and leaders must enlist the support of all team members to inspire them to do the things that they have to do.”

3) “Rules of the game”
Employees also need to understand the rules that govern the way the owner conducts the business. The rules must be written down and available to them.

“If the owner doesn't provide employees with the ‘rules of the game,’ they will go outside the boundaries,” Sugars says. “For lack of a better term, the inmates start running the asylum.”

The process of setting the rules of the game includes specifying company culture and values as well as ensuring that individual roles and responsibilities are defined with positional contracts, and operations and procedures manuals.

4) A clear action plan
The fourth key element for a winning team is a strong action plan that is spelled out in clear and unambiguous terms to all members of the team.

“While the common goals identify what the owner and the business want to do, the action plan identifies how the goals will be achieved,” Sugars says.

A good action plan will assign ownership of tasks, identify what resources are required, set timelines for when tasks should be completed and provide details of measurement and benchmarks over pre-defined time periods.

5)  Support risk-taking
To allow the business to grow, a leader must also be willing to support prudent risk-taking by the team.

“Business is all about risk and reward,” Sugars says. “You can never eliminate all risks, but you can insure that the risks you and your team do take can leverage your rewards.”

If the owner doesn't allow risk-taking, the business will tend to lag behind market leaders.

“Generally, the level of risk-taking a team member can take is highly correlated to the company's culture,” he says.

6) 100% inclusion, participation and involvement
By offering 100% inclusion from the team, the owner can then require 100% involvement as an expectation of the organization's culture.

“This leads to a greater level of trust and a comfort level by the owner to delegate responsibilities,” Sugars says. “It’s the first step the owner can take to full delegation – because ultimately, the definition of a true business is a commercial, profitable enterprise that works without the owner.”

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ActionCOACH is the world’s number one business coaching and executive coaching firm, with more than 1,000 offices in 26 countries. To learn more, go to actioncoach.com.