5 Things to Take Your Team From Good to Great

We all know the basics of an average team. They usually consist of one or two people calling the shots and the rest are waiting for directions. There is a lack of enthusiasm and the majority of the people are there for the paycheck. Monday mornings are dreaded and Friday evenings are celebrated. Sometimes you get a spark of greatness, whether it be a manager or employee, but most people are “working for the weekend.” (As the Loverboy song goes.)

A few years ago I stumbled into an opportunity that has defined how I approach leadership and team building. I was hired into an IT inventory management operation for a large retail company. I routinely refer to the experience as my version of graduate school.

It was an opportunity of a lifetime. Our team of eight people was responsible for managing the backup IT inventory for 60+ US sites, launching new products/services, and providing equipment to for rapid infrastructure growth. We launched three major services, helped launch several new sites, and processed equipment from two one-million square foot buildings that were decommissioned, all within the first nine months. It’s amazing what eight people can do in a 40 hour work week with the right tools and leadership.

Here are 5 things that made that team great:

1) Employee Empowerment

The first step towards building a great team is allowing your employees to make the low-risk everyday decisions without having to seek management’s approval. These decisions are often small and do not involve company funds. Things like changing how products are stored, what products are too damaged to ship, and whether a product can be ship overnight to meet the customer’s needs should be made without the approval of management. These actions will increase the quality of your service, improve customer relationships, and reduce the amount of time that is sucked from the manager’s day.

Our team was empowered to do little things like upgrade shipping speed, recommend other cost effective options (often involved buying from our competitors), and pull staff from other teams as our workload increased. In order for this to work, we had to have a strong understanding of how our operation added value to the company. We were a support team that allowed the company to save money by combining most of the repair parts in one location so it can be shared across the network. As a result, if a site requested equipment, it often was a critical part that needed to be overnighted. We were allowed to make those decisions ourselves while management would review our costs on a regular basis to make sure we were reasonable. We weren’t micromanaged which lead to trust between management and employees.

Consider Reading: Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders

2) Everyone’s A Leader

There can never be too many good leaders on a team. Remember, good leaders know when to lead and when to follow. They also know how to actively listen and quickly identify great ideas from their co-workers. Having a group of good leader all working towards one goal is unstoppable. An added bonus is that leaders develop other leaders.

Our team was full of leadership. Everyone was considered a “leader in training” and we were constantly coached to push ourselves as newly formed leaders. We were encouraged to think for ourselves and fight for our suggestions. Our decisions were made quickly and we were sure to not undo previous work without having solid data to back it. By teaching us how to make decisions, we were able to spend a lot less time going through formalities and instead spent it focusing on bettering our process.

Does a manager (sometimes even a director) really need to approve buying more pens for the team? What is the difference of pay between a low-level worker and a manager?

Consider Reading: Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

3) Encourage Continuous Improvement

Complacency will be the death of any team or business. In order to constantly remain relevant, you need to continuously improve your approach. Many companies, like the one I worked for, have process improvement programs where they look at the entire operation at least once a year. It is important that the group isn’t just a bunch of managers in a room calling all the shots. Involve the low-level workers who will be performing the new processes. They are the ones who can flag simple things that are commonly overlooked at the management level. They are the experts, not management.

My team was responsible for creating processes that were never done before, verifying them for quality and accuracy, and then immediately assessing them for speed and quality of work. By the third time we were going through a process we were already attacking them for improvement opportunities.

The one thing to never forget is that process should always focus on quality before speed. Shipping a terrible product/service at the speed of light will only sink the ship faster.

Consider Reading: The Toyota Way

4) Management Served the Employees

Management should be obsessed with the needs of their team and constantly serve the employees under them. The team itself is what will perform the majority of the work in an average day. They also are the resident experts in the standard operating procedures. You should trust that there is always some truth to their requests for more tools/people/etc. The job of the manager is to analyze the request by understanding the true root cause of the problem. Look for opportunities to grow your employees by providing them with insight into your decision process.

I fondly remember the day when we complained about the lack of space available for our inventory operation. We had hundreds of different products and only about a hundred storage locations which all had product in them already. It was widely known that we were probably going outgrow our facility. We tried using it as a crutch for change. Our manager quickly showed us how we can accurately store multiple types of products without losing the ability to quickly find things. Later we found out he was pushing for both more employees and a larger building to prepare for the rapid growth we were seeing. By pushing on both sides of the problem, we were able to get the resources needed without expecting others to fix our problems for us.

Consider Reading: Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t

5) Obsessed Over Our Customers

A lot of teams often forget who they are serving. It can be especially difficult if the group serves as a support function such as IT, maintenance, project management, etc. Your customer is often just another employee at the company. We argued that this is even more important since you can now cause a delay downstream if an employee is stopped from doing their job (picking product, shipping product, receiving product, etc.) because of a failure of our technology.

Our team’s role was to provide replacement equipment to sites when outages happened or when the equipment failed. Our customers were other IT teams. They came first no matter what the cost was. Sometimes the best solution was to point a site to an outside vendor for either cost savings or fast shipping if we couldn’t meet their needs. Our priority was to deal with the immediate issue and then look for a long term solution. We would involve the customer in order to better understand their expectation and create a process that will meet it.

Consider Reading: Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

One last note. Once you build an elite team there needs to be a constant effort to address employee burnout. It is one of the major drawbacks of working on such a high performing team. In the end, 6 of the first 8 employees (75%) moved on from the team within 2 years of it being formed. Keeping talent in-house, especially when company money is spent developing them, should be a top priority when looking at the long term picture.

Now go build your great team! You don’t have to be a manager to lead these changes.