Building Your Winning Team

My friend and former colleague Dave and I were chatting last week about this blog.  I said that it was my weekly rant where I get to write about whatever inspires me over the course of the week.  He said, “staff meeting!”

He was, of course, reminding me of the soapbox I used to climb onto during staff meetings.  There are things I miss about my corporate job like health insurance and a steady salary, but there are definitely things I don’t miss including form-over-function processes and the bureaucrats who love them.

What I miss most, however, is my team.  I had the privilege of working with so many great people over the course of my career.  But my last team at Washington Mutual was special.  We were running a program to reduce deposit fraud and then supporting the handover to Chase, but I would have worked on anything with these people.

In 2008 I bought my team and a few coworkers copies of StrengthsFinder 2.0, and we shared our results citing examples for each other of how we saw these talents and strengths demonstrated through our activities. 

Having our individual strengths reflected back to us was enlightening, but what really struck all of us was when we mapped out our strengths because they corresponded to the various phases of a project.  If you needed help designing a solution, who better than Dave and Sheree with their strengths themes of Ideation, Analytical, and Intellection.  No one is better at pulling a team together and executing a complex project than Josh who has strengths themes of Communication, Arranger, and Maximizer.  And if we needed to tune into peoples’ needs and boost morale, we could always count on Stacie for Harmony, Positivity, and Empathy.  My strengths of Strategic, Activator and Relator pulled it all together. Through this process we learned how to leverage our teammates for support on activities that were part of our jobs, but not a strength. 

It’s been about 18 months since I started working on my own at home.  It’s a dream come true, but it has been a huge adjustment.  The core lesson I’ve learned is that I have to build a new team that can help me out where I need it.  For me this still corresponds to solution design, execution and morale. I’ve hired coaches, joined networking groups, and reached out to make new friends. I also have a loose-knit advisory group including former colleagues and friends who I can call on to review marketing copy, pilot new coaching programs that I’ve come up with, and generally provide feedback where I’m too close to the action to be objective. 

I’ve always been independent feeling like I can do just about anything on my own.  I’m therefore doubly grateful for the hard lesson I learned from being a manager which is that you have to foster relationships to be successful.  As humans, we’re hardwired to form communities.  It’s been a key to survival since time immemorial.

How about you?  Who is in your community and on your team?  Have you built a strong support structure that will help you accomplish your goals and dreams?  Do you ask for the support you need or are you stubbornly trying to go it alone?  Many of us are only too happy to be supportive of other people, but we hesitate to ask for the help we need.  It makes us feel vulnerable, weak, dumb, needy.

When you get really serious about accomplishing something, get serious about building the support structure to get you there.  It might require you to swallow your pride and spend some money, but hold your head up and do what you have to do to create success for yourself.

Start with making sure you have support for the idea/planning phase, execution/getting it done, and keeping up your morale.  The more specific about what you want to accomplish, the easier it will be to determine what resources you need, what to ask for and how to ask in a way that makes it easy for people to say yes. Of course, having a coach is a proven success strategy, and I’d love to be part of your team (pam.norton@transitionsparkcoaching.com).