How To Lead A Team: Good Teams Create Better Leaders

Once there was a sign posted in a small business that read:

The 57 Rules of Success

#1 Deliver the goods

#2 The other 56 don’t count

No doubt your company can feel the same way at times.

The pressure to produce results is a universal constant in every industry. Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, once noted, “The outstanding leaders of every age are those who set up their own quotas and constantly exceed them.”

The people in your company that know how to lead a team are the ones who work hard to produce results.

But the results your leaders want won’t depend solely on their hard work. If they only count hard work as success, your leaders and managers can get tunnel vision.

A strong work ethic is an admirable trait in any leader, but hard work does not guarantee results. In fact, working too hard can have negative effects when leaders neglect important relationships, ignore their health, or simply burn out.

Your leaders need more to get the results they want. They need to think about getting the results they want by building the team they need.

The Power of Teams

Your leaders need teams. The truth is that teamwork is at the heart of great achievement. The Law of Significance says that one is too small a number to achieve greatness

The beauty of teams is that when your leaders invest in others, they’re investing in their own ability to achieve the results they want. After all, teamwork makes the dream work.

• Teams involve more people, thus affording more resources, ideas, and energy than could any individual.
• Teams maximize a leader’s potential and minimize her weaknesses. Strengths and weaknesses are more exposed in individuals.
• Teams provide multiple perspectives on how to lead a team or reach a goal, thus devising several alternatives for each situation. Individual insight is seldom as broad and deep as a group’s when it takes on a problem.
• Teams share the credit for victories and the blame for losses. This fosters genuine humility and authentic community. Individuals take the credit and blame alone. This fosters destructive pride and sometimes a sense of failure.
• Teams keep leaders accountable for the goal. Individuals connected to no one can change the goal without accountability.
• Teams can simply do more than an individual.

Share these concepts with your team leaders to help them see that working harder doesn’t always equate to being successful or productive.

What your leaders need most to get the results they want is a team. It may be a cliché, but it is nonetheless true: Individuals play the game, but teams win championships.