Take Initiative With Your Team
How to keep them on the right track
You’ll hear many a blogger/motivational speaker/entrepreneur/frustrated parent speak about the value of initiative.
It keeps you goal-oriented. It gets things done. It makes you more successful. It leads to growth. All of this is generally true.
However, always be mindful of how and where your initiative is being placed.
As with anything in life, too much of anything can be can turn from a good thing into a…not quite so good thing.
Too little of it and you’ll wither. Too much of it and you might become an unstable tyrant of your own undoing.
It’s also easy to forget that our initiative does not exist in a vacuum either. In professional settings, more often than not, we are part of a team. It’s necessary to re-contextualize your initiative, and the initiative of others, for the sake of a team.
I apologize for using a sports metaphor, but I liken this to how a football team works. You’ve got a game plan for each of the players to play and then the group value of the winning team. A winning season comes not just from the constituent parts, but from the way those parts play together.
Since so many entrepreneurs and successful business people harp on initiative as a super-power, it is easy to lose sight of how it can become counterproductive to quality when unchecked.
Sometimes you’ve got a quarterback that all of a sudden believes that they are better, faster, stronger than the rest of the team- that they are the one true key to achieving the game plan. Their goals shift from getting it all done well, to getting it all done first. Initiative taken to an extreme like this is destructive to their own perception of productivity and to the team’s morale.
As a team leader, you’d have to wrangle this person in and make sure they are not hurting the teams cumulative efforts.
Ultimately, it will be up to the problematic individual to change, but as a leader, you’ll need your own initiative to see, assess, and tackle the issue.
Don’t forget to check your own initiative in this process as well.
Are you asking too much of yourself or others? Are you giving enough to make your goals feasible? Are you overpowering your teammates’ efforts?
Always make sure to not lose sight of where you stand.
If you can maintain initiative properly within a team, you make everyone’s job easier. Balance will create synergy, stimulus and forward momentum for to others to do likewise. True initiative is powerful enough to actualize goals on your own, but it becomes doubly as strong when harnessed well by a team.
Aaron Webber is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Webber Investments LLC, as well as a Managing Partner at Madison Wall Agencies.
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