Culture Curated Blog

Most leaders want to develop great teams. They hire excellent individuals and hope to enlist them to achieve their mission.

Unfortunately, even though the theory sounds logical, creating Dream Teams takes significant effort. Here are three initiatives to support the goal of Dream Teams:

1. Be intentional about your organizational culture: Develop a clear set of values to guide the behavior of your employees. Culture is not what you do but how you do it. Your organizational values should be displayed in every interaction your employees have with customers, suppliers, potential clients, co-workers, and future employees. The environment you create in your organization and an authentic connection with your team members will be reflected in the results your teams are able to achieve.
2. Understand Behavior. Stop guessing and relying on gut feeling: There is ample research information available supporting that human behavior in the workplace is driven by four factors. Dominance, extraversion, patience, and formality. If you want to successfully connect, engage, manage, motivate, and influence your employees, invest in a tool to understand what matters to them. Dream teams are those where employees’ differences are celebrated. We all have distinct abilities and areas of improvement. The bests teams are made of employees that complement each other. On that same spirit of understanding behavior, learn about yourself. Understand your own leadership and how it is perceived but your team members.
3. Manage the forces of disengagement: In an ideal world, the longer employees are at a company, the higher their level of engagement is. Unfortunately, employees face forces of disengagement, which ultimately lead to them performing poorly and/or leaving. Lack of Job fit, and manager fit are the most common forces of disengagement. However, after the pandemic, new forces of disengagement have appeared. I am talking about hybrid work, skills gaps, labor shortage, and the great resignation. Disengaged employees affect the company bottom line, tend to miss more work, offer poor customer service, and lack connection to the purpose of the company. Culture is the best way to manage these force and keep a pulse on engagement and performance levels.

Dream Teams have high levels of trust and collaboration. Employees that get a sense of fulfillment from their work are less likely to leave the company they work for. Historically companies with highly engaged employees have lower turnover. If you are a business leader, consider creating an engaging environment where people can thrive. Invite your team members to connect authentically with your organization and embrace the concept of dream teams. When you apply these three initiatives you build teams of super-performers. Beyond that, work becomes something more than just means to earn a paycheck. Work becomes an essential aspect of living a rewarding life.