Leading a Team of Champions

Episode 2 of 2 – Can your champions become a championship team?

In the first episode entitled “Are You Leading a Team of Champions”, we described the five attributes that allow an employee to become an individual “champion” at work. We defined the workplace champion as a self-reliant overachiever.

Assuming now that you have recruited your team members and groomed them into becoming individual champions, your next mission as a leader is to transform the group of individual self-reliant overachievers into a “championship team”. We define a “championship team” here as a group of workplace champions who, through their willingness to perform and deliver, can achieve results that are much greater than the sum of their individualistic outcomes. This is a team phenomenon famously known as synergy.

We mentioned in the first episode of this article that transforming a group of individual workplace champions into a championship team is not obvious nor a given, since individual workplace champions are expected to be solo players. A very common example from the world of football supports this statement. Football clubs spend sometimes hundreds of millions to attract highly talented players but then the team they have put together fails to achieve as expected, struggles to maintain consistent performance, and most sadly gets beaten by an average team with mediocre budgets.

In this episode, we will describe the attributes that facilitate the team transformation we described above. These attributes are extracted from Dr. Patrick Lencioni’s amazing book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

1. Admitting Own Weaknesses

Imagine the pieces of a puzzle. None of the pieces by itself is the whole picture, and obviously getting the pieces together is the only way of seeing the end product. Now mostly every piece has a cavity that we will assume is its own weakness and a nail that symbolizes its strength or added value. Every piece allows the added value of another to close the cavity it has, and this process allows cohesion among all pieces. Similarly, every team member has strengths that complements others’ weaknesses and some weaknesses that are complemented by others’ strengths. However, if a team member does not admit this weakness, another member will not be able to close this gap with his or her added value.

2. Embracing Constructive Conflicts

You might think that a team experiencing conflicts among team members is not effective as if conflicts are always signs of problems. If all team members always agree on every idea, every suggestion, and all have the same opinion about every business situation, then only one team member is necessary. The others are just echoes of each other. Championship teams realize that conflicts are a natural phenomenon of individuals working together. It is like a sparkle and this sparkle can either set up chaotic fire that would turn results to ashes, or it can be an ignition that initiates an engine startup and drives the team towards achieving extraordinary results.

3. Undivided Commitment to Team Decisions

After experiencing conflicts of opinions, ideas, or decisions, all teams eventually choose a stand toward a certain business challenge. In a championship team, regardless of how the decision has been made, whose idea it was, and whether all individual champions agree on it, every champion will have undivided commitment to the team decision. They might have disagreed during the decision making process or may not be convinced, however they maturely commit and defend the team stand in front of others. In the case of championship teams, being open about conflicts allow members to voice their opinions openly and constructively. This attribute fosters higher level of commitments.

4. Peer Accountability

This is an attribute that would seem a little strange for organizations. The dominant assumptions in today’s workplace is that an employee is held accountable only by the direct manager. A championship team respects the role of leaders in holding everyone accountable. However, they allow other team members to act as their voice of conscience and to remind them about their duties and commitments. This requires humility of admitting mistakes when others alert you about commitments and then act from the heart to rectify your actions.

5. Results Anxiety

When championship teams embrace the four attributes discussed earlier, they are relieved from spending their energy on personal unproductive disputes. They do not need to think about protecting themselves or focusing on surviving the corporate world. They will not be worried about who will take the credit for the success or get the blame for the failure. Consequently, all their attention will be driven towards results and all their worries would be an anxiety to win. This is a positive kind of worry that does not paralyze professionals, but on the contrary gives them incentive to invest their all into the best for the organization. As a result, they become a championship team that will be a top achiever in the marketplace.

Leading a team towards achieving business championships requires fostering the above five attributes through maintaining equilibrium between people relationships and focusing on results. If you would like to know how to develop a team of champions, join us for our upcoming workshop: “Leading a Team of Champions”. All details are available on the link below.

https://www.meirc.com/training-courses/leadership-management/leading-a-team-of-champions