6 Ingredients of Creating a Winning Team

"No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it."

High performance doesn't happen by chance. It involves a deliberate and masterful attempt on a day-to-day basis to engage top talent in a collective pursuit of performance. It's done by creating an environment for engagement and synergy. When organizations indulge in creating this high energy environment, employees quickly realize the level of commitment required by the system and work dedicatedly to live up to that level. And when it comes to the end outcome, the result of such a culture speaks for itself.

Since both Qualitia Software & Zensoft Services are currently at a growth stage, we've been continuously implementing new strategies and techniques to empower our teams so that they surpass not just our but even their own expectations. After all, isn't that the primary responsibility of a leader- to create and manage a winning team?

In my opinion, there are a few critical factors that are essential in creating a winning team. Here are six ways that will not only help you in creating but also managing high performance teams.

1.     Awesome Leadership

Leadership is all about passion. Why? It's because passion is contagious. As a passionate leader, you must have complete clarity of the end result and then find a way to communicate it to your team so that it becomes crystal clear to them as well. Another critical aspect to leadership is trust- make sure to keep your agreements. It's as simple as that. Also, strike a balance when it comes to giving feedback to your team. Being transparent, yet compassionate is essential.

2.     Common Goal

"Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships." And what leads to effective teamwork? A common goal. For this reason, it is essential that regardless of their designation, every player on the team is aware of the organizational goal and understands his/her role in the context of achieving it. A team where every member is aligned with the company's goal is the key differentiator between good companies and great companies.

3.     Action Plan

While creating an action plan, having clarity of the expected results plays a vital role. I’d say, visualize a result and then plan for it. Every action your team takes along the way needs to be aligned with achieving the organizational goal.

Additionally, to continually empower your team members, create a self-review mechanism. This helps everyone to monitor their own performance.

4.     Collaboration

If you’ve noticed there’s one golden rule that all winning sports teams abide by. And, that’s collaboration! One of the first things that a good coach teaches his team is collaboration. Understanding that your success is dependent on everyone else’s success is the key to creating and managing a winning team. "Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much."

5.     Rewarding

While results are always rewarded, I think rewarding behavior is an absolute necessity while creating winning teams. As they say, 'reward the behavior you want repeated.' This act of recognition will lead to excellence which in turn will produce the desired outcome.

6.     Risk Taking

Aptly said by Albert Einstein, “The true source of knowledge is experience.” At both my companies, we live by the ‘fail fast and fix fast’ ideology. While we all aim for greater success, giving your team the liberty to fail and learn from their own mistakes is one of the greatest things a leader can do. So allow your team to take risks along the way. Not only will this harness their sense of accountability but will also help them learn lessons that no coaching program could've taught them.

I have been personally trying all the above-mentioned strategies, and having achieved success with them, I decided to share them with you. I’d love to hear what you think of them, and it would be great if you could add to these with your own experiences and learnings.