The Team Myth

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The Team Myth

As this year's Super Bowl approaches, we offer five steps for successful team building in any organization, including yours.

GERRY SANDUSKY

Too many business owners and executives think of "team" as a label. It's not. A team is an achievement, a dynamic process that includes talent, focus, motivation and sacrifice. It has a personality, preferences and a unique culture.

The team myth leads businesses to think they can borrow a word or a label from sports that can replace or expedite a process. Sure, you can call the people down the hall your marketing team. That doesn't mean they'll act like one. Neither will your leadership team, your operations team, or your production team until they commit to the five steps needed to form a team.

Step 1: Assemble a talented group of people. Talent matters, but identifying and recruiting talent is only the first step. Talent alone is never enough. Every year in the NFL, talented teams fail to make the playoffs. It works that way in your business, too.

Step 2: Build everything around a clearly defined goal or series of goals. All teams organize around specific objectives. In the NFL, every team builds around the goal of winning the Super Bowl. To do that, teams map out a series of goals, with each goal moving the team farther along in the direction of the one major goal.

Step 3: Create a clearly defined and shared success benefit for each team member. No one on an NFL team shows up to practice every day focused on earning the head coach a new contract. In your organization, no one shows up every day hoping to earn the CEO a bigger bonus. Everyone arrives motivated by his or her wants, desires and hopes. Harnessing that broad spectrum of ambitions and motives requires clarity.

The success benefit for a team has to extend beyond each team member's salary and individual motivations. Salary is a personal benefit. Successful teams revolve around shared benefits. What is the shared success benefit for your team members?

Step 4: Every team member buys in with a specific and shared sacrifice. A team has members who sacrifice something important. That surrender creates a buy-in, the foundation of a merit system. No one gets to play right tackle for the Cleveland Browns just because his father played right tackle for the Cleveland Browns.

As the season progresses, every NFL team has a leader in rushing yards, receiving yards, tackles, and sacks. On the best teams, those distinctions take on considerably less weight because the individuals who lead those categories see their efforts as a way to bring their team to a higher level of shared accomplishment. Ironically, on losing teams the statistical leaders often draw more attention to themselves. It becomes an individual focus. And that tears a team apart into a group, a group of individuals.

Step 5: Hold the team to a specific time period. Groups, associations and organizations are open-ended. Teams are not. Teams have a specific start and end date. The first four steps help your team reach the start date. The fifth step, the end date, helps push the team with sense of urgency, purpose and focus. Following this year's Super Bowl (coming soon!), every one of this season's NFL teams will cease to exist. Sure, the Baltimore Ravens, Chicago Bears, Philadelphia Eagles, Seattle Seahawks and Green Bay Packers will all continue on as organizations. But the 2014 Philadelphia Eagles will end. That team ends the minute it plays its final game—and every team member knows it.

After the season, many of those 2014 team members will try to position themselves back at step one: becoming part of the talented group the organization assembles for the 2015 team. Your team needs a specific time period that drives it toward achieving excellence. Is it a month? A quarter? Half a year? Two years? You decide. Make sure your team knows the date of its Super Bowl.