3 Keys to Building Teams

You have probably seen the news about Boeing’s recent struggles with plane safety, public trust, and rapidly dropping share prices. Last week, after a second crash of its new 737 Max 8s, Boeing shares plummeted by 12 percent. It was the biggest drop since the company’s losses immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  

At that time, Alan Mulally was the head of Boeing, and his leadership brought the company back from those historic losses, to achieve record revenue and earnings within five years. His philosophy was to create a compelling vision for the company and then work as a team to achieve it. He called it the “Working Together” model. A few years after that, he went on to do the same thing at Ford, using the same model to change the culture at the automobile company during the Great Recession.   

Creating and building a cohesive team that can work together to achieve your company’s vision is critical to your success. And, as Mulally has demonstrated, teambuilding may actually be one of the most important skills of leadership.  

As we have focused on developing and empowering our team at Titan, we have found these things to be extremely valuable in the process: 

1.     Teams are Made Up of Individuals – This may seem obvious, but I think it’s important to remember. Your team is made up of distinct individual with unique characteristics and talents. They also each have personal areas that need growth and development. As you work to develop and grow each individual in their areas of focus, the whole team gets better. 

At Titan we have created an assessment, that allows us to identify areas of focus. All of our leaders make an individual plan with each person on the team, to identify their goals and establish milestones. Investing time and energy into each individual to help them gain skills, confidence, and achieve their own personal goals, strengthens your team and allows you to perform at a higher level collectively. 

2.     Learning Opportunities and Feedback – I love the quote by Abraham Lincoln that says, “Men are greedy to publish the success of their efforts, but meanly shy as to publishing the failures of men. Men are ruined by this one-sided practice of concealment of blunders and failures.” I think there is a tendency to try and ignore or hide our mistakes—both as individuals and as a team. And I also think this is a mistake.  

The more you can honestly address and evaluate your team’s failures and mistakes without blame, but just curiosity about what you can learn from it, the more your can neutralize their power over your results. As Mulally said, when he became the leader at Ford, “The situation is not good or bad. The situation is just the way it is. We get to decide what to do about it.”  

It is extremely valuable to be able to analyze our failures and learn from them without judgement. In this way we discover where we can improve and where and why the breakdown occurred. By acknowledging our mistakes whenever they occur and then assessing what we can learn, our team has systematically worked on our company’s limitations and weak spots to be a better team and produce a better product for our customers. 

I love the idea from Dan Sullivan that we are either succeeding or we are learning. When we approach our perceived failures with this perspective, it builds our team’s confidence, trust, and capabilities. 

3.     Empower Decision-Making – Going along with a culture that learns from mistakes and failures, is the idea that everybody on the team should be empowered to make decisions, even if they’re not the “right ones.” Giving the members of your team the power to make decisions sends a clear signal that you trust them. It also gives them a real stake in your company’s results. 

Too many people worry about turning over the reins and decisions to others on their team because they feel like they won’t be able to control the results. But this hesitancy leaves team members uninvested and underutilized, and, most importantly, feeling undervalued. Remember that even if a poor decision is made, the experience can be extremely valuable for someone’s learning and growth which ultimately helps the whole team be stronger. 

Value the input, insights, and perspective of your team. Think about Mulally’s model again. He created a clear and compelling vision and then used the “working together” model. His whole team did the work, made the decisions, implemented the strategy. You can’t really “work together” if you are making all the decisions and everyone else is just “following orders.” This will never build a team. 

It is no different in our teams. Putting time not only into our individual development, but the development and strengthening of our team will make a huge difference in our outcomes this year.