Build an Unstoppable Team Today With These Two Simple Tricks
Were you ever on a team where you felt unstoppable? Where the efforts of each person were catalytic? Where the momentum steadily built until you were racing past your target? You might have experienced this in your life—perhaps on a sports team, in your workplace, volunteering, or even in your family.
How are these unstoppable teams built? What allows a team to operate at its highest level?
Alden Mills, a decorated U.S. Navy SEAL, says the answer lies in moving from human selfishness to selflessness. In other words, it’s about the team members shifting their focus from themselves to something much larger than themselves. Mills claims this is the first leadership principle of Navy SEAL training, and the brilliant thing is that it applies to business leaders as well. How does he know? Easy, because he has been both. This mindset switch is the key to building resilient, goal-oriented teams regardless of the environment.
There’s an African proverb that captures this perfectly. It’s one of my favorite expressions. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
What factors create remarkable collective success? I believe there are two sides to this story that have to come together to create fairy-tale teams. One comes from above, and the other from below.
The Right People
Not all teammates are created equal. Toxic teammates exist in the workplace. They can destroy teams, sometimes on purpose!
There are different types of toxic teammates—those who lack social skills and prefer working alone, those who do nothing but complain, those who are lazy and love taking the recognition without doing any of the work—the list goes on. They all have one thing in common: they have an uncanny ability to destroy the productivity of the team.
Toxic teammates believe they are fundamentally victims and don’t show up to win. They show up to whine. They have a whole arsenal of destructive behaviors to reverse productivity that they can whip out on any given day, including gossiping, procrastinating, and staving off responsibility. They’ll say or believe things like: “That’s not my job,” or “They don’t pay me to care,” or “Not my problem.” One bad apple can spoil the barrel. Some experts claim that toxic teammates can reduce a team’s productivity by as much as 30 to 40 percent!
These characteristics are night and day from those that unstoppable teammates possess. Alden advises looking for the seven personality traits below to spot people likely to become unstoppable teammates:
Competence – a curiosity to learn new skills and develop mastery over important skills and subjects.
Perspective – self-awareness of how past experiences and challenges have shaped their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.
Communicativeness – the desire and ability to express ideas and emotions.
Drive – a can-do spirit, strong work ethic, and hunger to succeed.
Humility – inclusiveness, self-awareness, and respect for others.
Flexibility – an openness to new perspectives and to embracing other ways of thinking.
Selflessness – an aptitude for service and placing others’ truth and interests above their own.
So trick number one is simple: weed your team of any toxic people. And do it quickly, before their toxicity seeps into your team’s foundation and leaves costly and time-consuming cracks for you to fix.
At the same time, creating unstoppable teams is about finding the right balance. It’s about Yin and Yang. Having the right people is the element from the bottom. Your leadership is the element from the top. You have to have the right team structure in place for your leadership to succeed.
We could talk here about the different strategies you could use to optimize your human resources and make your team a productivity machine. But managing people is a lot more complicated than moving pieces around a chessboard. It doesn’t really matter whether you have the best strategy if you forget this ultimate principle: Treat your employees as if they are volunteers.
Lousy leaders think that signing paychecks gives them permission to treat people like slaves. Lousy leaders try to control their employees and treat them as passive objects. Lousy leaders think that they are the masterminds behind the game and that their employees are simply the hands they need to move the pieces.
That leadership style is foul, and yet it is so common in the workplace! How often have you heard a manager or leader complain about the incompetence of his employees? How all he wishes is for them to just shut up and do their jobs? You’ve probably worked for someone who had that mentality (maybe that’s what drove you to open up your own business). Or maybe you have a fellow business owner that you’ve overheard speak this way about his employees.
The bottom line is this: Nobody performs optimally under this leadership style. Nobody likes being in a workplace where they are controlled. People need freedom and autonomy to perform properly.
Let me illustrate this for you. Have you ever been discouraged about something personal or professional and confided in a friend or mentor about your feelings, only to have them spend the next hour lecturing you on what to do to fix your problems? I have, and trust me when I say it does not do any good. And yet I find myself going right to that how-to-fix-it mode when my wife comes to me with anything that’s bothering her. Why does this happen?
Because we like the power of telling. Telling is easy. Telling is fun. It takes a lot more digging, learning, and growing to listen to the other person and understand their struggles deeply. It takes a lot more mental power to ask the right questions that lead people to finding their own answers. Telling is putting a bandaid on an open wound and calling it a day; leading through questioning is getting a degree in medicine to properly close the wound.
It’s normal if you’re having a hard time making sense of how this applies to interacting with employees. On one hand, you have literally hired them to do the job that needs to be done to run your business. But people aren’t robots. So how do you strike the right balance between guiding and controlling so that your team performs optimally?
Treat Everybody as a Volunteer.
The answer is simple: treat everybody as volunteers. Peter Drucker is the man behind this transformative mindset. When we treat people as volunteers, we rein in our egos and embrace humility. We accept that we don’t have everything figured out and start relying on others’ contributions to piece together the puzzle. We start to create collaborative conditions where every person’s contributions are valued. By letting go of control, our teams start to catch fire.
Drucker gives a few words of wisdom to the leaders bold enough to embrace this mindset:
Focus on people with passion and not just those with talent.
Seek agreement, not instruction, on expectations and deliverables.
Ask permission to hold people accountable.
Express gratitude sincerely.
Address tough conversations with kindness.
Focus on aligning organizational and individual values.
Build meaningful relationships.
Listen attentively.
Include all members of the team.
Respect everyone deeply and equally.
Where on the spectrum do your team’s issues fall? Does your team need an attitude makeover? Or is it your leadership mindset that needs a reset?
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