Have you ever lost a valuable member of your team? We all have. And we all hate it.
If you want to keep your team strong and stable, then you have to study how others manage to be the best places to work and then become and stay one of those types of employers. The most important indicator of Great! teams is the level of strategic engagement between team leaders and the members of the teams they lead.
Top teams use massive amounts of strategic engagement to create and build on a culture of having loyal, talented, and enthusiastic players who want to stay on the team forever. They do this by:
- Inspiring individual and communal bonding, loyalty, and commitment
- Actively promoting creativity and collaboration
- Showing people how to find great satisfaction and meaning in their work
- Teaching deep knowledge about their company, their people in their company, their industry and workspace, what they do, and how they serve their clients/customers
- Focusing on serving their team members first and their clients/customers second
This last part is the most important, contrary to the popular opinion of the customer comes first. One of the best value statements I’ve ever seen is, “We don’t build bigger and better teams so we can give more service; we give more service so we can build bigger and better teams.”
Keeping a great team together requires:
- Attracting talented, smart, creative people
- Engaging with them continuously and continually
- Providing them with opportunities to enhance their own position in both the team’s life and their own individual lives as well
We will talk a good deal about this in the next several posts in the business facet of Great! All the Time!
[reminder]In ten words or less, describe best thing about the best teams in the best place you’ve ever worked.[/reminder]