Every leader is concerned with building their team. For some of you, it may be a small team of 3-4 people, for others it may mean hundreds or perhaps even thousands. Regardless of the size of your team, every leader should ask themselves, “what do I want out of my team?”
As you go about building your team, you should ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish with your team. Is it to operate for a short period of time together to get a project completed? Or perhaps it is to build a team that will be together for years? How you approach leading your teams will vary greatly, depending on what you want out of it.
One of the great mistakes many managers and project managers make is to assume that they can use the same leadership style to lead any team. I have seen too many rookie project managers try to manage every team the same way, usually by forcing process and procedures upon them. In a bureaucratic or mission culture this may be acceptable but in an entrepreneurial or clan culture, this can be the start of a very rocky relationship with a team.
Know what you want from your team. Performance, longevity, teamwork, independent thinking, getting along? What’s important to you and your organization? By defining this, it will make building and leading your teams much easier.
All the best,
All the time
JT