Why You Need to Create a Team-Building Environment

The following is adapted from Further, Faster by Bill Flynn.

Teams aren’t a modern revelation. They were around a long time before the first business — or football — was launched. Our ancestors endured because they were tribal and their chances of survival were a whole lot better when they worked together. People in tribes knew what each member was supposed to do, and they trusted one another to do their jobs. The people responsible for getting the meat for dinner didn’t worry about how they were going to find the vegetables, make the fire, or take care of the kids while they were out hunting. They trusted others in their tribe to do those things. That freed them up to spend the whole day doing what they did best, confident they would return to the cave and all those other tasks would be done. Those people are our very distant relatives, but we evolved from them and our brains are still wired like theirs. We’re built to survive by working in teams. We have a natural inclination to work as a team, yet in business, leaders seldom create an environment that supports teamwork.

Most businesses survive and even thrive on the backs of a handful of people. As a business grows, the effort those few people have to put in doesn’t decrease — it increases. Because instead of taking full advantage of all their resources, leaders figure out really quickly who they can rely on to get things done, and they tend to let everyone else sort of slide.

You can imagine what happens with those people who are doing the lion’s share of the work. They get burned out. They lose their passion for the work and they quit. That leaves a gaping hole in the effort required to run a growing business.

If the top one-tenth of your people left, what would happen to your business?

It’s like tug of war. If you have ten big, burly players on your team and the other team has a hundred smaller players, as long as those hundred players are doing their part and pulling on the rope, they’ll wear out your ten guys eventually. But if you put another seventy or eighty players behind your rock-star rope pullers and get them to pull their weight, your team won’t wear out. It will go further, faster, and it will endure.

You probably have people in your business who spark change. They can’t carry the whole load, though. You need to involve everyone eventually, and that’s where the team comes into play.

In your business, there are two main types of teams: those directly involved in making your products, providing services, and collecting the money, and those that support those teams.

The first set of teams typically comprises marketing, sales, engineering, manufacturing, delivery, customer service, and billing. Teams such as IT and human resources support these teams. Every team has a specific function and so when you’re building teams, it’s necessary to identify that function and populate the team with the right people, working toward fulfilling that function. Before all that happens, you have to create an environment where these teams can flourish.

If you want hundreds of thousands of people interested in your product, you need the entire marketing team working together to make that happen. Not just the social media people, not just the lead generation people, and not just the technology people. You need all of them working together. From there, the sales team takes over, with business development and sales and customer support. That’s how the work gets done — teams make things happen. Unfortunately, especially in Western culture, we celebrate the hero, not realizing the hero is standing on the shoulders of the team. And so we design our businesses for the individual — the hero — instead of for the team.

The shift from focusing on the individual to focusing on the team starts with you, the business leader. Getting the best version of every one of your individual human resources takes changing your mindset from one that believes it’s okay to rely on (and typically, reward) a handful of people to one that looks to all its people. It takes recognizing that your business’s success depends on creating an environment where teams thrive.

Create Great Teams

Great teams require people who believe what you believe — not just the most skilled people. You can train them for skill.

Often, we want to get the job done fast, so it’s easy and convenient to hire people who can hit the ground running, with little to no training. If we then see that the person is a bad fit for the team, we ignore the problem, focusing on their immediate impact and figuring that they’ll fit in eventually. We almost always regret those decisions because the odds of a person changing are slim.

You’ll go further, faster and be able to sustain that momentum by looking for people who are excited by your vision and eager to be a part of it. Teams thrive when the people in them share similar values and believe in a common purpose. Beyond that, they need some skills, but they don’t need to be experts at the job — they can learn. I would rather hire the person with the minimum set of skills who’s a great fit culturally over anyone who has all the skills and can start right away if there is a risk they are not a good fit for the company and team culture.

The more people you have working for you who share your values, purpose, and your vision for the company, the further and faster you will reach your goals. Instead of relying on a handful of people — your trusted circle — shoot for alignment with at least 50 percent of your team, with the goal of recruiting, vetting, and training a higher percentage of employees who also see your vision and are committed to helping make it a reality.

You can learn more about strengthening your company through teamwork in Further, Faster, now available on Amazon.

BILL FLYNN has more than thirty years of experience working with and for hundreds of companies, including startups, where he has a long track record of success. He’s had five successful outcomes, two IPOs, and seven acquisitions. Bill is a multicertified growth coach, has a certificate in the Foundations of NeuroLeadership, and is a Certified Predictive Index Partner. Away from work, he is an avid reader and athlete, and enjoys volunteering locally.