DL Your Team Foundations

YOUR TEAM FOUNDATIONS

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Your Team – Foundations This is how I see it…

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Your purpose

Your team

Your clients

Your product

The business purpose comes first. If we put team first, we can justify not fighting for or living the purpose. There will be exceptions. The exceptions become the norm. It stops being about the purpose, and becomes about people expressing their individual purpose, so it’s no longer the business purpose, but many individual purposes. I don’t know how to manage that.

I do know how to unite us around one purpose, and to ensure we hire and retain people who care about it… a lot.

If we get the right people, they will care about the purpose, and will demonstrate that through how they care for our clients.

Our clients come third, because my team is our pathway to success. If I had to do this alone, I’d max out at 50 clients, have no life, and be too tired to share my message.

My team ensures we are scalable and replicable. It ensures I, personally, don’t have to be everywhere, all the time, thinking of everything, which would impede client service.

Product comes last. There will always be a product. There will always be new products. The product is not the point.

Our clients joined for the product. They stay for the experience. The experience they receive with our team, because of our purpose.

The product can change. And it does.

The experience only improves as we get better team members even more committed to the mission.

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It’s Not About the Job In any business, there is always so much going on. There is always more work than people and resources available. That’s normal. Especially if the business is innovative, because new ideas are being generated constantly.

If this wasn’t the case, the place would be boring, there would be too little to do for the high performers, who don’t value spare time and feeling they have to pad their hours. They loath that.

So, high performing teams have lots on.

That’s the first thing.

The next is this – people are more than their current roles. What people do is not all they are capable of and not all they want to be. Sure, there are exceptions, but generally, the high performers want to experiment with new skills, learn about new ideas, and contribute meaningfully to growth…

So the job description can be a limit.

This doesn’t mean don’t have them. It means don’t let that define the person and their capabilities.

A list of capabilities on a page do not equal the person, nor their potential.

The job description is a guide, only, to what must happen when that person receives the role, in terms of expectations and accountability.

I believe the description should also have a section dedicated to the ideas they can generate, the innovations they can bring, and the solutions-focus they’re expected to have.

I would rather have three people who are empowered and able to improve my business, than three people just doing what I tell them to do.

When I mentor my team, I’m not only focusing on their current responsibilities. I’m also focused on their capabilities that aren’t covered in the job description.

I’m looking at the whole person. Their hopes. Their dreams. Their desires. Their fears.

Their ideas. Their thinking. Their actions.

I look at the whole picture, to guide me towards how to help develop them.

Sometimes this means the role they’re in isn’t suited to them. For one person, this meant me saying: Stop doing what you’re doing. Spend a couple of months finding what your song is within this business, and let’s figure out if that’s what you can do.

This freed them to stop stressing about what they couldn’t do, and sent them on a quest to find their ‘thing’. Which they did.

I think people like certainty. The reason they’re not in their own business is because the certainty of the boundaries and the infrastructure is comforting. It takes a lot to start a business, where none of that is provided, except by yourself.

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So it makes sense to give people certainty. This can be through a job description, or through a list of functions they’re expected to focus on and deliver.

I just don’t use this as the way to define them.

When I do performance reviews – which we get to in the next section – I spend little time on the job they’re doing, and more time discussion where they see they can grow their role, and where they see the opportunities for growth and innovation.

I want their ideas for how we can improve. It sure beats leaving it all to me.

Also, it means we attract people who enjoy being innovative. There are many people who are tired of working in companies where their ideas are ignored. We love the ideas. We act on them. We expect them as part of being part of our team.

And with this, I bring a sense of possibility about what they do. They are not defined by the job they’re in. They’re defined by how they think.

One person we had with us for five years started as an administrator in one department.

They moved on into events and doing admin there. Then they learned to manage one person. Then they got better at thinking and planning and took on more responsibilities around operations. And so on.

The role never limited them. If they had a passion for an area, brought value to it and were able to have a go at it, I encouraged it.

They didn’t always get it right. No one does. I encourage mistakes as part of the process of learning.

I believe the first mistake is a mistake. The second, same mistake – that’s a choice.

Feedback is given on the thinking, not on the mistake.

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SHARON PEARSON Disruptive Leadership Module 4 | Your Team Foundations Edition 1 | Version 2 | December 16 Published by The Coaching Institute Copyright 2016 Š The Coaching Institute All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or by information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

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