How to avoid the traps that hinder creating awesome teams

Have you been a part of a great work team, sports team, or volunteer team? Most people have at some stage. You then know what it feels like to achieve the goal of your team. You know the camaraderie that you experience. You have experienced the joy of people developing and growing.

Being a part of a great team is awesome. As Patrick Lencioni quotes: “If you could get all the people in an organisation rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time…..Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.”

How do great teams come about? I spend a lot of time teaching leadership and team development. In my training seminars and workshops with team leaders, when I ask that question, they intuitively know some of the reasons, but they are mostly guessing.

One of the key ingredients in great teams is leadership. John Maxwell says, “Everything rises and falls on leadership”. 

Most organisations rely on groups of people working together to achieve certain goals. The team leader, at whatever level, is the key to helping the organisation achieve its goals and potential.

Recently I got two Ikea flat-pack bookcases. I didn’t realize that they came with step-by-step instructions and proceeded to put it together. I made good progress but also made a number of mistakes. At one point I almost had finished when I realized I had to take the whole bookcase apart because I had missed a vital step.  I was quite frustrated with the flat-pack and myself. I then opened the next flat-pack and discovered the instructions. Between the instructions and my previous experience I put it together with no mistakes and half-the time and frustration.

When it comes to leading a team you can make it up as you go. Chances are there will be some successes, you might fortuitously create a great team, but there will probably be some mistakes, detours and even failures along the way. Those mistakes might cost you a lot of credibility, time, money and stress.

Being able to lead and create teams on purpose increases the productivity, retention rates, and morale in the workplace. Learning from the mistakes and lessons of others is not only wise but less painful.

There are over 4000 books published each year on leadership. A scan of the literature reveals that not much focuses on leading a team.

There are 5 traps that many team leaders fall into which hamper their effectiveness. These are the traps to avoid.
Focus is everything…

Whatever you focus on is what you get. If you have been reading the previous Transform Leadership articles you would be familiar with this saying.

As you shine a torch in a dark room, where you focus the torch light is what you’re going to see and notice, everything else is left out.

Interesting you say, but what’s that got to do with leading a team of people or an organisation.  Well the same principle holds for you and your team right now.  What you’re focusing on in your leadership is what you’re getting.  If you’re focusing on lack – you’re experiencing lack.  If you’re focusing on abundance I know you’re experiencing abundance.  If you focus on competence or opportunities is what you are going to encourage.

This universal law is true for everybody.  What you’re focusing on currently as a leader is determining the results that you’re getting.

For example if you spend a lot of time focusing on problems and the stuff that’s going wrong, do you notice how you seem to get more problems and as you get more problems, do you notice you start feeling down about yourself and kind of irritated or frustrated and the more you focus on that are you noticing how you get even more of the same?

And now let’s flip it.

What are you excluding to be able to focus on all those problems and the frustration, the irritation and everything else that comes with it?  Aren’t you excluding all the solutions?  Think about it.  You have within you the torchlight of possibility.  Where you shine your torch – and I’m just talking as a metaphor right now – but where you shine your torch that will determine your outcome.  If you focus on solutions and results then that’s what you’ll start experiencing in your team.

Now it might not happen straight away but that’s okay, you’re increasing your opportunity for improving your results.

I was facilitating a debriefing session for a team a couple of months ago. They had been highly operational and were all feeling like they were getting behind in their day-to-day work and hadn’t achieved much over the last six months. Tensions and frustrations were starting to surface in the team. Where was their focus? It was what they hadn’t been able to do in the last six months. In my session with them I simply got them to write down all the things they had accomplished in the last six months. Then they each read it out for the team to add anything else that had been forgotten. When we had started the session there was an air of defeat, tension and pessimism. After everyone had read out their accomplishments there was a huge amount of energy, optimism and positivity.  The only thing that had changed was where they were choosing to direct their focus.

You have what’s called a filtration system in your mind and that means in any second – I don’t know who counted this – but in any second of time you’re experiencing around 2 million pieces of information.  That’s a lot of information!  But you can’t possibly focus on all of those bits of information all of the time because you’d go insane or you’d be a puddle on the floor thinking  “I can’t speak” and you wouldn’t be able to walk.  Think about it if you now had to be aware of how to walk and how to talk and how to clean your teeth.  If you had to be aware of every singular muscular movement involved in just holding a toothbrush you’d be frozen and you wouldn’t be able to exist.  So your mind is an incredible mechanism to allow you to function.  It deletes and just leaves out everything that’s irrelevant to current experience.

I’ll give you a great example of this.  Have you ever driven home in your car and not been aware of 15 minutes of the journey.  That is the filtration system working because it knows it knows it can just go to automatic and just drive you home safely, you didn’t have to be aware of everything to get yourself home safely.  Hopefully you don’t have to do that too often or for too long.

But that’s an example of your brain in action, perfectly leaving out everything that’s irrelevant and just freeing up your mind to think as you drive along or just whatever you do in that time.

How does this relate to being a great team leader? Leaders need to take control of how they interpret their world and focus. Notice what your language reveals about what you are focusing on. The ability to choose your focus as a leader is the essence of great emotional intelligence and thus great team leadership.

There are five things that average team leaders focus on. Obviously there are shades of how often and how severely leaders focus on each of these traps.

My desire is to arm you with the knowledge and tools to be able to avoid the traps and choose to focus on those things that will build your results, happiness and camaraderie.

These 5 Traps are an amalgam of my observations, reading (particularly Patrick Lencioni) and personal experience.

The 5 Traps to Avoid are:

1.  Focusing on I rather than we
2.  Focusing on being a friend rather than a leader
3.  Focusing on being right over moving forward
4.  Focusing on peace rather than healthy debate 
5.  Focusing on perception over being credibility