How you handle the "Who" is a critical part of creating productive teams. You remember back in childhood when you waited to be picked to be on a team? For some it might have been an excruciating exercise in patience and shame. For others they were the first to be picked because they had all the perceived talents needed to help the team win. Now there are efforts to eliminate the pain of not being picked until the last so that no one has to feel left out. But really, the truth of the matter is that not everyone is good for the team and will help them win. (And then of course there are those that don’t want to keep score because everyone is a winner). I am not of that camp and here is why. It promotes being put in a position that really isn’t a good fit for your strengths, where it will be difficult to really thrive and excel rather than finding the place where you really do have strengths. Not everyone is gifted with the talents needed to be a great basketball player, nor is everyone wired to be a great computer programmer or public speaker and so on. Every football team has only one quarterback and so it is with work teams. Great teams are built not just randomly chosen, thrown together and expected to perform. Great coaches identify talented players and develop and place them in the positions where their strengths can do the most good. Yet, many organizations make their teams out of volunteers that may or may not have the right chemistry and strengths to really be productive. It is a little bit like having all quarterbacks and no receivers on the same team. So if you want to win with productive teams you might need to create them with careful forethought about what talents and strengths you really need in order accomplish your goals. Unfortunately, there will always be people that really want to be picked for the team BUT SHOULDN’T BE! Hurt feelings aside, there’s many people that don’t know their true strengths and would only hinder the productivity of the team. But then again there are team captains and coaches that don’t know how to read and assess the strengths of their team either, so where can we go to get help. I have found lots of help in this endeavor from the Gallup Strengths Finder test and from the work of Core Clarity, you can find them at http://coreclarity.net/. Knowing how your team members think and where they are likely to thrive and not thrive is powerful information for building a truly world class team anywhere!
RSS Feed