How to Create a Winning Team?

Find my approach that has worked well in 3 different industries and 3 billion-dollar corporations.

Having a great team is crucial for success in business, sports and many other areas. Practically speaking it is always better to have a team if you want to succeed instead of not having it and trying to make your path purely alone.

It is easy to say that you need to have a winning team but…

How to create a winning team?

Do you know the answer to this question?

What do you think about it?

There are a lot of different approaches to how to make a winning team. Many great advice on this topic.

Let’s not go into a detailed investigation and comparison of these approaches.

In this story, I will share with you my answer to this question. The answer is based on my experience which I got working at different corporations in different industries, managing and building high-performing diverse teams of various sizes from scratch.

Let’s get right to its core.

To create a winning team, you need to do the following:

Focus on creating new leaders, better leaders than you are.

That is it. Now you know the secret.

Nothing less, nothing more.

But you might be wondering what does it mean?

Let me explain.

I believe that the mission of every leader is to create new leaders who are even better than the leader who helped them develop.

An interesting thing is as soon as you start implementing this mission you realize that it is what is needed to create high-performing teams. The problem is that many leaders don’t really want to create new leaders out of their teams.

In many big corporations the idea of developing new leaders is highly supported by corporate culture but what works in theory doesn’t always work in practice.

Why so?

In many cases, leaders of big corporations are not really interested in creating better leaders in their teams as they think that it might have a negative impact on their own careers as at some point one of their team members can replace them if this person becomes better than them. That is their biggest fear. This fear is what stops leadership development and has a negative influence on overall team performance because if people are not developing, they stagnate.

So, if there is no focus on creating better leaders for the future then there is underperformance and no progress within the teams.

Coming back to the point. If you want to build a winning team you need to focus on creating new leaders, better leaders than you are.

Now, you would probably say that it’s easier said than done.

As always…

Do you want to know how to do it?

I will explain how I would do it.

My approach

Firstly, you need to set your own focus on creating new leaders. It means that you need to focus on growing others and their development. Your team in particular. You should focus on this goal of creating a leader out of each and every person in your team. Without skipping someone because they are not performing well, not motivated or whatever reason.

But is it possible to develop someone without having them on board for it?

No, of course not.

It means that you need to get your teammates on board. Each of them, one by one.

Talk to every team member individually, and understand their motivation, their goals.

What do they want to achieve?

For them, not for the company they work for, not for the team but for them.

This one can be not really easy. There is a big chance that if you ask such a question for the first time there are some people in the team who will not share this information with you openly. Also, there can be a situation that some people didn’t really think about that and don’t have any particular personal goals. The first point can be solved by building trust with your people. The second point requires deeper conversations which can help your team members to understand their goals for the future. But it always requires trust and real interest from your side.

If you already know what motivates your people and what goals they have you need to make clear to them how working in your team and achieving business goals will help them in their development and moving to their goals. This one can require some creativity from your side. But if you are interested in helping your team in their growth and achieving their goals you will be able to manage this one.

Also, from your side, you need to clearly communicate to your team members what is your mission as a leader and that your main focus is helping them to grow and develop while achieving their goals.

From this point do the following:

• Set clear goals and track progress. Always highlight when a person improving.
• Build and maintain trust. It is very important to maintain trust in your relationships with your team. Without it nothing will work.
• Delegate. As much as possible. When delegating try to focus on tasks which develop particular skills which are needed to achieve personal goals which a person wants to achieve. Highlight how particular tasks will help them in their way.
• Let them make mistakes. Of course, you need to ensure avoiding mistakes crucial for the business. As for the rest let them fail and then let them find a way to fix it and learn from it for the future.
• Support. Always be near to support them if it is really needed. Otherwise, if you delegate super challenging tasks there can be situations when they burn out. You should always monitor the situation and when it becomes too tough to handle you should “give a hand.”
• Give feedback. Openly share your feedback during one-to-one sessions with your team members. If they did a good job tell them, if they did something in a wrong way tell them and advise how it is needed to be done. Speak honestly about successes and areas for development. Keep in mind that all feedback should be provided with concrete examples and not in a general way.
• Celebrate success. Always celebrate the real achievements of your team and particular persons openly in front of them, other teams, and senior leaders of your company.
• Reward your team. Make sure that you reward your people if they achieve and overachieve the goals which were set for them. Rewards can be different. Some of them can be material and some of them not. You should be close enough to your people to know which reward better motivates who. As we are all different. One person will appreciate the promotion the most, the other one will be much more inspired by getting the “best employee” reward from CEO of the company in front of everyone.
• Be fair. Celebrating success is great but you should be fair. It means that you should not celebrate each and every small move done by someone. You should evaluate the level of celebration depending on the size of the achievement. Greater achievement means greater celebration and bigger rewards. Not the other way around. And do not celebrate daily routine tasks which are easily done by anyone. It depreciates the whole approach of celebrating success. If everyone is celebrated at the same level for anything they do there will be no real motivation to achieve outstanding results. High performers will not strive for more if it’s not rewarded properly.
• Be consistent. You need to be consistent with all this stuff. If you are not consistent it will not work and your team will stop believing you.

After a while, if you do all the mentioned things, you will see real change in your people. They will become stronger, they will develop. They will like their progress, they will like to win and your team will start to raise the bar of achieved business results and high performance.

Do not stop on what will be achieved. Continue to grow your team and yourself together.

That is more or less it.

Final thought

It was my recipe for creating a winning team.

Remember:

Focus on creating new leaders, better leaders than you are.

If you do it you will have a great highly motivated team of people who can fully cover the team’s area of responsibility, achieve impressive business results and even more. It will be done even without your participation.

Meaning you don’t only have a winning team but you are on your way to creating a new generation of great leaders.