9 Practical Steps to a Winning Team

When it comes to company goals, don’t try to go it alone. To build a company and steer it toward a growth path requires vision and collective effort. While the founder or CEO is the person primarily responsible for guiding the company to achieve your vision, you need the assistance, trust, cooperation and support of your team to help your company achieve its targets and stay on course for reaching your milestones.

This article looks at 9 essential steps of building a good management team.

According to Lawrence King, to survive and thrive in a digital world, you need a top-notch management team. However, teams cannot be built overnight. Team building involves a meticulous step by step process which one has to follow with a lot of planning, tact, observation and encouragement.

Step 1:

Realistic assessment: First and foremost, make a realistic assessment of your team - what kind of team members you currently have, their strengths and weaknesses and the areas you need to build on.

Step 2

What will you be doing in the team? It’s imperative you have a clear idea of your own role in the team – either as team leader, coordinator, chief mentor, main think tank person or strategist.

Step 3

Planning is essential – For any team to succeed as a whole unit, you need a team-centered strategic plan in place. Pick and choose your team members and then get them together for a team-centered strategic planning session.

Step 4

Just as you should be clear about your role, your team members should be clear on their respective roles. However, to ensure that they do not work in isolation, each of them must also be aware of what the roles of other team members entail.

Step 5

It is important to make sure that the team members are well aware of their targets and performance measurement parameters. Team members who are assured that their performances will not go unnoticed feel motivated to go the extra mile. It is thus essential to develop and implement a performance measurement and rewards system to support the strategic plan. This kind of system also helps you to map out the progress towards achievement of goals and targets.

Step 6

Get your “CEO Stump Speech” ready. You may ask, what makes a “CEO Stump Speech” important. According to EMG Marketing Strategy Brief, “With proper positioning, a CEO who reflects the brand persona can powerfully project your institution’s brand values and reflect its brand personality better than anyone else. The real challenge is for the CEO to take on the persona of the brand rather than other way around. He or she becomes a high-profile model of what it means to be an engaged brand advocate.”

In this respect, the Brief goes on to add, one should take the opportunity to “create and incorporate a brand vocabulary and key messages consistently in the CEO’s public stump speech”. For small and medium sized companies, where brand building is usually a cost prohibitive activity and is limited to affordable options, a CEO Stump Speech provides a great option for projecting, enhancing and promoting your brand. For your management team as well, a clear identification of the brand with the CEO is necessary.

Step 7

Productivity thrives under a culture of learning, creativity, expression and confidence. Do not let your company slump into a culture of mediocrity and boredom. Encourage learning and allow the creative expression of ideas and thoughts within your team and your company. You will find that your management team has quite a few aces up their sleeves.

Step 8

Coach your key executives – Give regular training and guidance to your key managers and executives. It is an investment worth every penny you spend. Unless your key executives and managers are trained and updated on the latest trends, problems and challenges in the market, your business will not achieve its goals. Corporate executive coaching is thus a necessity and not a fad or indulgence.

Step 9

Train yourself – This is easier said than done. Where does a CEO go for training? Of course, one great option is to enroll for a one-to-one corporate executive coaching session with a professional and qualified executive coach.

However, another proven method of getting some practical and tested and battle-ready insights into how to overcome the challenges your business is facing and manage your team and resources better, is to interact and confer with other CEOs.

As the CEO, you may not receive honest opinions from your employees. On the other hand, as a member of a CEO Club or CEO corporate association, you will receive frank, even brutal and very workable feedback, solutions, insights, ideas and guidance from other CEOs who have “been there and done that.” Therefore, join some CEO club in Atlanta or anywhere else and see your dreams turning into reality.

Follow these 9 steps for building a winning team. You will find your business goals becoming more achievable than ever before.