How it works

The way to achieve your heart’s desire for your organization without feeling like you have to do it all or pushing, prodding, or pleading others to do it is to adopt these four essential practices:

1. Create the Context  Begin by creating together with your team the vision of what you want to create. What results are you looking for, what milestones can you identify, and how will you know you’ve accomplished it all? Take care not to get lost in over-analysis or something too large to get your hands around. Start with a practical, manageable scope and master that. As you do, you can revisit this step again and again to go deeper and longer into your  vision.

   Once you have this shared target, you will have a context for the rest of this work. This context, like a crucible, contains the good work you’ll do and not let it spill out and dissipate. The reason: we all need context. We are thirsty for it. It gives us a direction to head and reason to push forward.  If you and your team keep sight of this shared context, your work together will happen with greater ease and effectiveness.

2. Cultivate Personal Greatness To get consistently stronger teams, make sure the team members, including you, are each regularly learning and growing. In the same way airlines tell you to put your mask on before helping others, you and each team member must do something that can seem odd: put yourself first.

   Nourish yourself and create and environment where others can nourish themselves and you’ll be tapping the deep well of capability needed to excel as a team and as an organization. You and each of your team members come to work with your own talents, histories, needs, and goals.

   To cultivate personal growth, address both common and individual opportunities for personal greatness. Growth towards greatness comes through measuring then improving skills and talents plus replacing limiting beliefs with more empowering ones. Do this in areas such as time/action management, organization, communication, emotional intelligence, technical skills (including the more technical business skills), leadership, planning, and effectiveness.

3. Cultivate Team Greatness Team greatness is the measured by the extent to which they continue to create better results together. Just as great sports teams acquire new skills and practice them over and over, your team becomes great in committing to regular team growth.

   Great teams learn to avoid common team pitfalls such as turf battles, miscommunication, blame, and lack of focus on the real goals. You can do this too through deeper trust, commitment to the ideal of great teams, stronger communication habits, better planning, clear understanding of roles and accountabilities, effective meetings, and practical measurement of progress.

4. Sustain For your efforts have lasting effect, foster an environment of sustained learning and progress. Without a commitment to continue developing greatness, current learning withers and future learning never happens. You and your team have probably participated in more than a few improvement initiatives that fizzled.

   You may believe that sustaining this commitment to improvement is impossible. With some planning and forethought, you can do this. First, commit for one year to an improvement and growth process. It’s not important (or even possible) to know what you and your team will work on beyond the first few months. It’s only imporatant that everyone dedicates enough time and focus to both team and personal work for the full year. Though the actual time investment will vary based on the improvements you’re making, budget 1 to 5 days (yes, days, though often not full days at a time) per month.

   Next, seek support to help you build team and personal skills, faciiltate team work, and help you stay true to your commitments. Take care to use this support not as a crutch where the responsibility and intitiative for growth remains outside you and with the person or people providing support. Instead, seek support from talented people whose whole purpose is to enable you to do these things yourself.

You can start at the top and work through all four practices, one at a time. You probably will find it more useful to start with any one or more of the practices depending on what you and your team are up to right now. Make sure that, over time, you’re consistently building mastery in all four practices.

If this sounds right to you, click here to start with my free workbook Put Me In, Coach. You’ll learn a powerful way to begin tapping your team’s greatness potential and you’ll continue to receive regular support with my Insightful Leader newsletter.

If you’re still not sure, you may be stuck in what I call the Quiet Dream Killer. Click here to learn more.