The Best Teams You Will Ever Be a Part of Are The Ones You Put Together Yourself

Team members are ingredients to a recipe. No one ingredient - however important - stands alone. Each element must add to the whole.

Everyone has the ability to curate the teams that they are a part of. It doesn't always mean that you'll get to pick your teammates. Even if you're the hiring manager, you don't have absolute control over how the culture on your team will grow and evolve. Still, everyone can have a part in making sure that the ingredients in the recipe always make sense together.

Worst Tolerable Behavior

If you are in the position of hiring people onto your team, you have the most critical responsibility in team culture. Who you invite onto the team says everything about what you value. It's understandable that anyone can make a poor decision to hire someone who turned out to be an a**hole, and hopefully you'll correct that mistake as soon as possible. But the leader who knowingly hires one or keeps one on the team in the service of "performance" is digging their own team's grave.

The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.

Gruenert and Whitaker

Exceptional teams go farther than to relinquish the responsibility of culture-accountability to a sole leader. Each team member should hold the standard. The worst behavior that any team member is willing to tolerate will dictate the culture on that team.

When I was in high school, I remember having a very clear lesson in this.

It was the summer and a lot of people attended "open gym" where people could just play pick up basketball games together. During one game my sophomore year, I made a great block on a very tall, strong, show-off player (his 6'8" to my 5'8" at the time). On the way back up the court, he and I started jawing at each other (my mistake). The other guy, out of frustration, picked me up and dropped me on my head. Immediately, a senior, varsity guy on the team came running off the sidelines (he wasn't even playing). He got in the other guy's face and said in much more colorful language "take that behavior somewhere else. If you want to pick on someone your own size, I'm right here."

It wasn't a coach or adult supervisor who stepped in. It was one of us. That was the line. Everyone in the gym got the message loud and clear that day. That was the culture on our team.

The Group Above All Else

A cardinal rule of improv groups is that the action/scene is all about the group. Above all else, each person acts in support of the group. No show-boats, no leading roles.

If you have a toxic person on the team, it's bad. If you have a toxic person who is a top performer on your team, that's catastrophic, because it almost certainly sends the message of individual performance trumping all else. All those culture artifacts at your office (i.e. the mission statement on the wall, the cornerstones in the new employee packet, etc.) mean nothing. Your biggest culture indicator is the jerk who is permitted to keep applauding himself. He is not an exception. He is the expectation.

This 3.5 minute video by Gary Vaynerchuck is worth the listen. In his characteristically passionate way, he says that skills will continue to become commoditized. Emotional intelligence is the highest value professional capability.

When I hire team members now, I hardly even look at their resume. I'm becoming more and more convinced that resumes have zero correlation to job performance. I pay attention to the nature of their application - the words they used, the warmth in their email follow up, the tone in their voicemail. I look for cues and clues for TWO THINGS above all else: emotional intelligence and learning fit. Almost everything else is negotiable, but these first two are pass-fail to proceed. In a previous newsletter article, I shared my full notes on the hiring matrix I've developed to help our teams make better hiring decisions: Hiring Matrix.

Just Care About People

The top leaders of an organization should certainly know their stuff when it comes to the business. There's no arguing that business savvy, financial acumen, specialized knowledge of the marketplace, and other various expertise can give your company an edge. But, what good is a sharper edge on a knife if you're in a gunfight?

Especially during these harrowing times of the pandemic, organizations are learning the true cost of their deferred empathies.

In an attempt to match the speed of innovation and disruption at every company's door, companies keep extending the "one last push" rally from a temporary surge into an ever present modus operandi. It's just the way of doing things now.

• We just need to have a great month. (becomes..)
• We just need to have a great quarter. (becomes...)
• We just need to have a great year. (becomes...)
• Just go ahead and cancel your personal lives until further notice

Technology has made specialized knowledge (hard-skills) easily accessible to any organization. You can essentially crowdsource expertise in any area from a mix of within your organization and outside help.

The quality you CANNOT magnify through technology is people skills. So, I suppose my point here is actually a repeated one from earlier. Emotional intelligence is the number one skill that any leader (especially the top ones of an organization) must have in order to have any shot of lasting success.

Those credentials after your name (like MBA - yes, I know, I have one too) don't mean all that much. Leadership prowess is no longer indexed to the head alone. It is weighted against heart, too.

• It doesn't matter if you can read a financial statement if you can't read someone's emotional state.
• It doesn't matter if you think you can hold someone accountable if no one trusts you to hold their hand.
• It doesn't matter if you can write a performance improvement plan if you can't effective resolve conflict between members of your team.
• It doesn't matter if you lead a team to financial profitability if you can't lead a team to emotional vitality.

Putting It All Together

Assess your team often and remove toxicity from it as often as you find it. (If you can't find the toxic team member on a stressed team, you may be the toxic person.)

Whatever is the worst tolerable behavior that your team allows is the culture of your organization,

Hire people who put the team above all else.

Building your emotional intelligence skills and these skills in your top leaders will have exponentially greater return than nearly any other investment you'll make in your organization. Reimburse them for books or classes on the topic, send leaders to leadership workshops that develop these skills, or go for gold and hire a leadership coach for them (outside of the organization).

Or at the very least, sign up for this podcast. Here's the latest on some practical steps someone can take to improve their emotional intelligence skills. Level Up Leadership Podcast - Emotional Intelligence (Part 1)

Lead well my friends. Live your legacy today.

James Lee