The foundation of a successful team

You need to have a successful team to reach your goals and realize your vision. It doesn’t matter if you are a team leader in a big company or if you want to become a CEO and found a company yourself. For almost all business goals you will need a good team, whose members understand each other and can release their highest potential when working together. In a regular office the employees often just work together without really knowing each other. But a good team should know how the minds of the other team members work. As a leader you should know what motivates them, how you can encourage them and how you can achieve the best possible output.

So, how can you reach that point where your team taps the full potential? At first you should find a good location to bring your team to for some days. Somewhere quiet, somewhere where you and your team have to organize yourselves in every aspect of the day. Where they have to decide what to cook, what to do, how to delegate the tasks so that everybody has something to do. You may even find a good coach, who is specialized in team building. A coach knows best how to form a unit and which team building games will have the greatest impact.

Recently I was given the opportunity to experience such a weekend. My key learnings from that weekend are:

1. Information gets more and more distorted the more people are involved in a chain of communication. Reduce the chain of communication as much as you can.
2. Information that gets discussed in meetings never reaches the other employees in its original sense. Try to communicate as clearly as possible what has been discussed.
3. If a team is too big and the roles are not distributed clearly, you will need a lot more time for solving problems.
4. Sometimes it is better not to focus on the perfect product, but to build one, which is as near as possible to perfect, so you can then improve it step by step.
5. If you want your idea to be recognized inside of your team, you have to fight for it. Despite fighting for your idea, you should respect the ideas of the others and identify if they are better than yours.
6. If you work with your team on a problem, everybody should be conscious of the strategy and vision from the early beginning until the end.
7. There are different roles in a team. There have to be thinkers, leaders and workers and every single one is of equal value. You may think this is obvious but many teams have wrong distributions, e.g. too many thinkers and no workers. They discuss too long and never reach the goal of a good product.

These are the most important things I experienced during my team building weekend. It was fun and I got to know my team colleagues a lot better. Now we are able to eventually tap our full potential and produce a product of such good value, we would never have imagined before.

My advice:
Good communication, clearly defined roles and a good
balance of disciplines is the foundation of every good team!