The Basics of Leadership Team Building

Establishing Core Leadership and Ideas

Even so, talking about "leadership" in a organized corporate setting sometimes seems oxymoronic.

I hold an optimistic view for peoples' ability to become leaders outside the tyranny of stupid rules and nonsensical laws. If you want to build team leadership, and encourage personal growth within your organization, you must hire people who will own their positions when they are given meaningful work, clear direction, and the trust to carry it out.

Finding the right people to lead is probably the biggest step, and biggest challenge to building a team with a clear sense of identity and a vision of where it's going.

The leaders of your team, sculpt how your team thinks, talks, acts, and performs.

Why?

Because leadership is the springboard that gives your team leverage. By creating leaders out of rank and file team members, you develop leadership that understands what it's like "on the ground," in many cases these leaders make more reasoned decisions, and responsibility for their actions.

How important is credibility to the leadership of your organization?

Great Leaders Have One Core Idea

Every move your organization makes is preceded by an ungodly amount of decision making and planning.

Despite all the planning, remember the old Army saying: "No plan survives contact with the enemy."

Despite all the decisions and leadership team building that goes into your strategy, the fact is, your business operates in the real world, against other real businesses with leadership and teams of their own.

To win this we must ingrain the core idea into the minds of our entire team, while giving people the room to think, act, and perform freely. Always keeping the core idea in mind, better, more relevant decisions and more goals achieved.

How do you get to the core of your ideas?

There are companies that personify a core idea: Southwest Airlines: "The Low-Fare Airline." They have the lowest fares on commercial flights in the U.S. Period.

That's their core idea and every decision the company makes is filtered and judged by it.

Following this type of singleness-of-purpose starting with your leadership team building is simple because it minimizes confusion and maximizes results as the idea spreads throughout your organization.

If an proposed idea doesn't meet the criteria of your "core idea;" don't do it. Simple.

It's Simple, Stupid

In Chip and Dan Heath's great book, "Made to Stick" there's a great example of leadership team building from Bill Clinton's 1992 Presidential campaign.

As you probably remember, it was a very complex campaign, coming right on the heels of the Gulf War. A campaign marked by rumors of Bill Clinton's escapades with women not named Hillary.

A simple phrase captured people's attention and took the focus off the candidates and put it squarely on the issues that were important to the people of the United States.

"It's the economy, stupid." James Carville's simple phrase clearly focused what Clinton stood for in the eyes of the voters and took their gaze off everything else. This is pure leadership. Influencing people to follow you despite your flaws.

The phrase stopped Clinton's camp from sending mixed messages to the American voters, and allowed people to "pin down" what Clinton stood for.

It's Your People, Stupid

Leadership team building is similar in many ways to a group of voters.

Some are in your camp by default, some are undecided, some people are rooting for the other guy, and some want you dead (let's hope not).

Leadership team building is about sending a clear message to your team that allows people to understand, be influenced and inspired, and to "buy in" to what you're doing.