3 Ways To Improve Your Team

No man is an island. If you want to be successful in business today, chances are good you need to do more than just be the best at what you do – you have to lead a team to success.

What can you do to improve your team?

Encourage individual responsibility. Every person on the team must feel as if his or her efforts are critical. For each individual on a team, every job is a kind of war, every job is a competition. Unless you win, nothing has meaning. Each member of the team must feel that they alone hold the fate of the team in their hands.

Allow for failure. If you want your team to be more creative, you must be wiling and able to support failure. Failure will happen. As team members explore and create, there will be successes and there will be time things do not go as planned. On a poorly functioning team, failure is met with finger pointing and recriminations. On a great team, failure is embraced and used as a learning tool for the next effort. To encourage great creativity on a team, one must be prepared for – and prepared to accept – failure.

Don’t constrain creativity. Many employees begin to think that their job is just fulfilling their own individual roles. Encourage your team to think beyond its own assigned roles – imagine possibilities outside of their job descriptions. This is the “outside the box” thinking that may give rise to innovations.

As the Los Angeles Kings and San Antonia Spurs have recently reminded us, great teams win. Business is no different.

Photo credit: RogerMaluenda (https://flic.kr/p/atfZam)