Chapter 6
Teamwork

Once your goals and expectations are determined, leaders choose team members who can help achieve goals. Leaders guide team members and respect their input, and real leaders lead through performance. As an example, over the past several years I've had more requests to give speeches dealing with teamwork than probably any other topic. I've never liked to talk about team building because once a company gets to the point where they invite me, the team is already built. Everybody has a contract and a uniform, so at that point we need to talk about teamwork.

The idea of teamwork is huge. Everywhere you look, everybody—corporations, schools, nonprofits—refers to teams in one way or another. Winners and leaders recognize the importance of the team concept. Leaders know they need to not only be team members but also support the team and be supported by the team members. Leaders need to be sure team members know where they fit and understand their roles on the team. The biggest barrier to realizing the value of a team is a lack of clearly defined roles. As we've discussed before, the reason most people give when they leave a company is that they don't know what's expected; that is, they don't know or understand their role on the team. A lot of people whom you would like to have on your team may be willing, but in order for them to be effective, you need to have a conversation about expectations, roles, and the things that are important to you and your vision.

As you prepare your team for winning every day, you as a leader need to describe where you want to go and what you want to accomplish. Once you've communicated this information, then you need other team members to complement and support your talents. At the same time you, as a leader, need to support the talents of your team members. It's crucial to the team's success and, therefore, to your own.

If your team has only point guards, for example, then all you do is pass the ball around and nobody scores. In other words, if team members are there only to support you and never to challenge you, then you don't accomplish very much. If your team has only shooters, then there's nobody to throw the ball in. You lose either way.

On your team you need both leaders and supporters. You need people who are going to take risks and people who are going to support the risk takers. Sometimes you have to do both. As a leader, you need to be the person to step out front. If you need to do both, as a leader you need to show your team members that you're willing to do whatever it takes to make them successful.

Every employee must feel critical to the team's performance and productivity. Every player needs something to which he or she can be attached to personally, something to which he or she can make a genuine contribution. In sports every player must feel critical to the outcome of the game or to the team's status as a winner. In a family, parents must feel critical to the development of their children.

I have multiple sclerosis (MS). I need every team member to recognize my vision, and I also need every team member to recognize my disabilities and when I need help. Everything we do is a team effort even though many times we feel alone.

Even in individual sports there's always a team involved. There's always a support system. There's always someone who understands the goals and the desired outcomes and then tries to contribute to achieving those goals.

On your team, as a leader, you first need to identify and understand what it is you want to accomplish and whether or not a team is actually necessary or important to reaching your goals. I can't personally think of any situation where a team would not be needed. Then you must determine what the members of your team need and how the role of each person factors into the team's shared accountability and expectations.

On every team, you need go-to players, team members who are reliable and on call for specific circumstances. This includes team members who are supportive and those who are challenging to the leadership.

The process of forming your team basically requires you to: number one, evaluate your goals; number two, review your assets and liabilities; and three, make sure that you have not only team members who support your assets but also team members who offset your liabilities. You need to determine the team talents that are needed. You also need to select additional team members with necessary assets. Lastly, you need to select team members who are committed to helping you as a leader.

The most important factor of a team is to make sure that it functions properly. Team members' participation peaks at different times based on the team's needs. Of course, everyone is available when needed.

Remember that it takes only one individual to cause the team to lose. Have you ever observed a situation where everyone has a good attitude, then one negative person walks in and within 15 minutes the whole team is down? You have to separate yourself and your colleagues from that kind of a team wrecker. Eliminating such a person's presence will automatically improve the probability that your team will succeed. As a leader it's a very interesting situation to be in because you want everybody to be successful. Even if a leader has a caring and supportive attitude, there are times when the environment is not right for certain people. It doesn't mean they're bad people or incompetent; it just means they don't fit with the environment. The chemistry's not there. And with that said, those people need to find a new environment so leaders can preserve the attitude of the positive team members who are left.

You know the cliché that is very appropriate here: It takes only one rotten apple to spoil the whole bushel. I remember one person I worked with a few years ago who had several team members who supported what she did and what she wanted to accomplish. Then, almost overnight, one team member decided to take control and do what she thought was best for the whole team. As opposed to being a support person, she took on the role of being the leader and made everything all about her. It didn't take long for the team to become disrupted and very dysfunctional.

My advice was really simple and commonsense: Eliminate that person from the team. It doesn't mean she's a bad person. It doesn't mean that she didn't have good intentions. But, in this case, it meant that she didn't fit in that particular team concept. Once she was eliminated, the team came back together, and the person who had established it as a support system became very successful.

When you forge your team, what you should put in place is something that will be enduring and present every day. People will see it, feel it, and want to be a part of it. This intangible quality should remain even if you make changes. In other words, the team concept is an enduring factor. It needs to be related to your philosophy of a team, your goals for your team, and the foundation of the team. It must be capable of living through even the most dramatic changes a team could face. The winning chemistry of the team must be constant because it will be based on the same basic philosophy that you had when you started.

This foundational concept should be what keeps the engine running smoothly. Now, changes on the team are something natural. They are not always comfortable, but they need to be made on occasion for the good of the whole team. Change can be exciting and it can be rewarding. Variation of the team's makeup can produce tremendous results if it's done for the right reasons and the goals are kept paramount. In teams and in families, you must have dramatic changes like those that occur in sports.

There are still times that will test your team philosophy, but if the basic concepts are what they should be, then you must hold onto them, keep them out front, and strive toward your goals every day without fail. You must be able to call on team members when they veer off track so then you're in a winning mode.

In almost every team, whether it's personal or professional, there are going to be conflicts. To be a winning team does not mean that team members have to love each other. It means that they have to respect each other's assets and liabilities and they have to play in a coordinated way. Conflicts are part of the equation, and in many cases they make a team stronger, especially when they're resolved. Conflict can be a positive thing if it causes change and risk taking, which are good for the team.

Recognition of the contribution of the team members is essential. As a leader, you need to be in a position to provide recognition for team members when they make significant contributions. They're going to look to you for support, they'll look to you for positive reinforcement, and you need to deliver that. That's one of the areas in which we don't do a very good job in the corporate environment. We're quick to point out mistakes and very slow to point out the good things that people do. It's very important that when team members do things for the good of the team—things that may challenge you or that you might initially disagree with—it's very important that you recognize those contributions. It's true for every kind of team, whether it's a personal team, family team, or corporate team. Let me give a good example that I've used many times, and have probably used in every book that I've written, of what I consider to be consummate team concepts.

When I spoke at a company's annual employee-appreciation meeting around the year 2000, it was neat to see everybody in the corporate structure come to the meeting. The cleanup up crews, the gardeners, and the receptionists sat at the same tables and had lunch with the corporate people. I had refused to speak at the meeting if they didn't invite those people because I thought they were very important team members. It was interesting to hear one member of the janitorial staff tell me it was the first time in 25 years he'd had lunch with one of the corporate members. They got to know each other and became friends. It was one of the most enjoyable professional experiences I have had.

Talking with those team members and watching them interact, I could easily see that they shared a strongly coordinated work ethic and common goals. That environment was what I consider to be a winning chemistry. Chemistry is one of the areas that we play down in the corporate environment because you can't attach numbers to it and profit from it directly. But it is an absolutely critical concept to be nurtured by team leaders. If you do nothing else in your environment with your team, improve its chemistry and coordination. Then you've done your job.

Here's another example. I was working with a sports team in which the chemistry was never emphasized. The team was made up of talented athletes, but it was not a true team. There were no support players. The players were a group of individuals who played under a team name, and they were not successful.

To give you an example, they had a player on the team who was voted MVP of the league but he probably did more to compromise other players than anyone else on the team. He was such an incredibly selfish individual that he may have played great and produced his own great numbers, but he likely cost his team a chance at success because of how he disrupted the chemistry in the dressing room.

Chemistry is one of those things that we don't talk about until we don't have it. On your team you need some members who are supporting players. You also need others who are independent, adventurous, aggressive, risk-taking, and those who want to be in control. To make it the consummate team, you need diversity, so the team can't consist of only your friends; it needs people who are going to enable you to be successful.

I've always said that the consummate coach is the one who creates an environment that has good chemistry in which the players can play the game. I was with the Atlanta Braves for 16 years, and I always admired their manager, Bobby Cox, because he only had two rules: Show up early and play hard. He put the names on the lineup, and he let the players play. He was very smart in how he did that, and he also put them in positions where they could succeed. One of the things that he did that I admired most was that he let the leaders lead.

As I said in the first chapter of this book, the leaders are not the CEOs, the managers, and the coaches. The leaders are the players. The leaders are everyday guys on the team. Bobby always let that happen and therefore we won a record 14 consecutive division titles, which will probably never be broken. We were able to do that because every single year, even though sometimes we would have 10 to 12 new players on the 25-man roster, we kept our leadership players, and everything seemed to fall in place. The chemistry was good. Every year, those leaders who played every day made sure that the chemistry stayed good, and it was obviously a prescription for success.

I like to use a very specific personal example of the importance of leaders within a team. Since I was diagnosed with MS a few years ago, I established what I think of as a team that has enabled me to stay relatively healthy and also to remain productive. When you're diagnosed with a devastating disease for which there's no cure, it's very easy to be emotionally down. It's easy to crawl into a hole and avoid contact with people. But early on, right after I was diagnosed, I established my team because my doctor had told me that, no matter what medication we picked, my attitude would to be my best friend or my worst enemy for the rest of my life. Everybody needs a team that's good for them.

My team members may seem unusual, but they're good for me. One of the people I chose for my team was Bobby Cox. He was not only supportive during the four or five years I stayed with the Braves after my diagnosis, but he also had a way of creating an environment where the emphasis was not on the downside of my illness. People often accuse me of making fun of MS, but that isn't the case. I accept it for what it is, and so did everybody around me on the Atlanta Braves. Bobby was very compassionate, very caring, but at the same time, as I've always told people, he was the captain of my team because he never once in those four or five years excused me from doing my job. And even though he has a very strong compassionate side, he understood what I needed to do. That may sound strange to some, but it's very effective for me because it kept my wheels turning. I had so much respect for him that there was no way I would not do the job that I was hired to do. It was just understood that was the way it was supposed to be. I had occasions where I couldn't go to the stadium or didn't feel good or it was too hot. I could have called and said, “You know, I'm not coming,” and he could have said, “That's fine,” but he didn't do that. I credit him for keeping me in a healthy state of mind.

One of my other team members was Ben Thrower, a neurologist at the Shepherd Spinal Center in Atlanta. He's my physician and I trust him with my life. People ask me what medications I take, and I have no idea what some of them are, but Dr. Thrower prescribed them, so I take them. Everybody should have somebody they trust in that way. I never question what he says to me or what he recommends to me. He's a very important team member.

I have other team members as well. My children are the reason I continue to do what I do. They are my inspiration, and I consider them to be critical team members. I have friends on my team who call me constantly and check on my health and see how I'm doing, and I tell them I'm hanging in there. Then I have other team members who are friends and challenge me on a daily or weekly basis. When I say to them, “I don't think I can go to lunch,” their response is, “Be ready in 15 minutes. We're going to lunch.” I always feel better after I do those things.

As I mentioned before, it would be very easy to feel bad, and it's so difficult sometimes to feel good. But once you take the step to feel better—and sometimes it takes team members to cause you to take that step—then you're glad you took the risk and also glad you took the chance.

I think one of the most critical requirements with team members is that you, as the leader, need team members who actually talk to you. We need to move away from Facebooking, texting, Twittering, and e-mailing. We need to communicate at least verbally, if not face to face. It's very important that you realize that 60 percent of communication is nonverbal. It's virtually impossible to use that 60 percent if you're texting or e-mailing. You need to physically see people. You need to be able to read people. We've used the cliché a few times in this book: What you are talks so loud people can't hear what you say. Basically that means that people need to see you, see your reactions, see your eyes, see your body, see your posture, see how well you're moving around. They need to feel those things and good team members are willing to do that.

As a leader, it's very important that you promote face-to-face communication. We've gotten away from talking. We are raising generations of socially awkward kids because they don't talk anymore. And the further we move away from that, then the more isolated we become as members of a team. It's your job, as the leader, to change this situation if you see it happening. It's very important that people respect what you're trying to do in regard to communication because that's such a big part of leadership.

In regard to communication, one of the most important things you can convey to your team members is that it's critical to address issues right away. If you have a problem on Monday, don't call me on Thursday to tell me about it because I don't care. But if you have a problem on Monday and you call me Monday, I care a whole lot. And so you need to make sure that everything is up to the minute and up to date in regard to basic communication. It's not hard. I know when things get tough, common sense is the first thing to go, but commonsense leadership is communicating with your people, reading their body language, and making sure that you keep those folks on track.

In a corporate environment, you can always conjure up ideas about how to make your team better, but I think the consummate team starts with the environment. I've been in both sport and the corporate environment; both are like a NASCAR pit crew. It's amazing to me that when a car comes into the pit, there are five people who are called over-the-wall people. These five people change four tires, fill the car with gas, pull off the windshield liner, get the debris off the grill, make adjustments to the car, and give some water to the driver—doing it all in 11 seconds. And they practice every single day. When I used to go to the NASCAR shop for the team I was working with, I'd go out back and watch them practice. They would have a guy driving the car. He would pull up and the pit guys would do what they do. They'd change little things and tweak the process to save the guys a half step or enable them to make a quicker turn around the car, or to help the jack man get there faster. I mean, it's amazing when you think about it to watch them do what they do.

When I was working with Tony Stewart's pit crew in 2002, they would get a huge bonus if they completed everything in less than 13 seconds—so they wound up being able to do it in 11 seconds. It's just incredible, the coordination of the team. At the track, they have computers that track the amount of gas a car has and how far it will take you; it's accurate up to half a lap. Drivers will call to the pit crew or to the crew chief and say, “I need a quarter pound of air taken out of the back right tire.” Meanwhile, I'm sitting here thinking I barely know when my tire's flat. But it's something that they've learned to do through years of practice and training. NASCAR pit crews display some of the best-coordinated team effort that I've ever seen, and if you ever get a chance to see it, even if it's on TV, it will do you and your team some good to watch it.

We could talk about teamwork for days, and everyone can always come up with several examples of good teamwork versus bad teamwork. But the important thing to remember as the team leader is that it's your responsibility to ensure that the team works smoothly. It's your responsibility to help people be in the right spots at the right time. It's your responsibility to coach upward so that people above you understand what you're doing as a team leader.

In summary, I think it's important to: number one, recognize your assets and your liabilities; number two, select team members who offset your liabilities and other members who supplement your assets; number three, select team members who are committed to helping you reach your goals; and number four, communicate your goals and aspirations to team members so that they understand what you expect from them.

And it's not a bad idea to talk with the team every single day about how important this all is because some folks are not going to listen all the time. That's just life as it is. So, we need to make sure as leaders that we keep team concepts out front every single day because that increases productivity and confidence and really eliminates basic paranoia in the job environment.

The final key to teamwork is that leaders need to recognize team members when they do something for you. It takes nothing more than a comment many times to show how valuable it is when team members try to do their best to make life better for the team. You need to recognize those people on your team. It may be weekly. It may be monthly. It may be yearly. But at your discretion, you have to get your team together and recognize everyone around the table for their contributions, which enable you to become more successful.

I would like nothing better than to be able to have all my team members get together so we could sit down face to face and I could recognize all of them. That's not possible, but it doesn't mean that we're not a team. We may be spread all over the world, but I know that the ones who don't live close to me are only a phone call away, and that's a great feeling. If you decide that you need a team, which I think everybody does, then you also need to make the commitment to have the team help you. This is no truer than in the corporate environment. You have people who really want to do well. Sometimes they disguise it, but they want to accomplish things. All they're looking for is recognition and some specific expectations. With that, they'll be a strong team for you; and you, as a leader, influence their behaviors every single day.

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Talents/Assets Needed

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What is expected of me as a team member? What do I bring to the mix?

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What is our team personality?

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What are the team's goals and what do they mean to me?

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What resources are available to reach our goals?

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What happens when we reach our goal as a team?

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