BLOG: The Importance of Building a Great Team

Any good leader will tell you that a business is only as good as the team running it. Finding a balance of talent, personality, skills and then getting it to all gel together is a tough task, but a quintessential of building a truly great business.

It takes leadership to build great teams and great leadership to build teams that last. The ability to make difficult decisions and set a standard of performance, which everyone meets, while constantly improving should be just a few qualities in the ethos of a solid team. Mastering ‘the art of people’ is what great CEO/MD have done for years, the ability to manage entire teams, while inspiring and leading at the same time.

It’s a well-known fact of life that a jack-of-all-trades is a master of none. Don’t feel you have to run the show yourself; take time to build up love and trust with your team. Empower them to take charge using the skills they excel at and train them to be future leaders. It’s all about having the right people in the correct positions, with the right balance of responsibility and workload.

Finding a shared purpose or creating a ‘mission statement’ is another aspect, which is vital to be embedded within your company culture. Finding a common purpose is critical, as you need everybody to be heading in the right direction. If everyone is fighting for themselves, it’s impossible to build a camaraderie.

One of the most common reasons values fail to resonate throughout a business is because they are too abstract. Strategic vision and values must be translated into something tangible, they have to be specific, constructed with involvement of the team, otherwise they can become meaningless. Values have to mean something to the team, you need buy-in from EVERYONE who joins and it has to be an integral part of the induction process.

Look at successful businesses; how many times do their respective CEO’s talk about the importance of the team driving the business forward. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that the power and knowledge of the team is greater than that of the individual.