If you’re an entrepreneur, chances are your past experiences with teams are something like mine were:
a.) the jumbled, mismatched team at Mr. G’s Handy Hardware, where you worked summers during high school. The team at Mr. G’s was pasted together with relatives of the owner and people no one knew what they really did anymore.
b.) the boilerplate corporate team of ACME Amalgamated, your first “real” job, where your team included people with skill sets hired by HR who were secretly plotting to sabotage and overthrow each other. You got who you got, and most of them really didn’t want to work together as a team.
In your own small business, you’ll probably want to do better than that. You’ll need people on your team who can support you and who share your values, philosophies, and work style. The following three principles will get your team going in the right direction.
1.) Build a culture of interdependence. This is a departure from what you may have known in the past, and it’s key to keeping people loyal, happy, and committed in businesses with small teams. Instead of valuing people who can work independently, start valuing interdependence — people who can work well in a team.
Interdependence is fostered by information sharing, team meetings, encouraging input, and modeling the behavior. Teams that depend on each other have less project hoarding, internal jealousies, “prima donna-ism,” and complaints.
2.) Get your people to think and act like owners. Team members who have an idea what it means to run a business and are appreciated for their input will bring much more value to the company than those who don’t.
Regular communication and understanding of the direction and vision of the company, training, team building, and a plain old “thank you” every once in awhile will do much to prevent the sense of entitlement that can creep in, as well as the games people resort to when they don’t feel valued as part of a team.
3.) Focus on each person’s value to the organization. Know your people and their strengths, and let them do what they do best. This includes pushing down decision-making and problem solving systems, which will keep you from being the bottleneck in your own company.
This approach means problems get solved before they end up on your desk — if you can let team members work out their own solutions — and yes, occasionally fail. And as you know from your own failures, these lessons will be invaluable to your team members.
Marcia Hoeck teaches entrepreneurs strategies for creating businesses that will run without them. Want to know more about creating a business that will run without you? Read Marcia’s business and team building tips and claim her popular free special report “From Problem Team to Money-Making Machine: How to Turn Your Existing Staff Into a Successful Team That Makes Your Business More Profitable” at => http://www.mybreakthroughbusiness.com .
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