No chemistry? How to create synergy/connection between team members

By Kathleen Black

“When culture and strategy are not aligned, culture eats strategy for breakfast.” - Peter Druker

This isn’t to say that strategy is unimportant, it means that an empowering culture will lead your team to success.

So how do you create an empowering culture? You can lead your team into synergy with the steps below.

Mission

To create a culture for your team, you need to start with your mission. Why does your business exist? What do you strive to achieve each and every day?

Sit down and create your mission statement to give your team a foundation of what is expected of them.

Describe the overall purpose of your team, what you do, who you do it for, how and why you do it.

Then, set the boundaries of your team’s current activities. Who’s doing what, and when they’re doing it.

This is the starting point of your strategic vision, and will give your team guidelines of how they are expected to collaborate and work.

Values

Reflect the core ideology of your team. These are the deeply held values that do not change over time.

These values will guide your team dynamics, and how your team members collaborate with each other.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when outlining your team’s values:

• Answer the question, how do we carry out our mission?

• Are the values your organization lives, breathes and reflects in all its activities, not the ones that you think you should have

Vision

Your vision statement will unite your team in a common, coherent strategic direction.

This will allow your team members to connect deeper by serving the team each day with the same vision in mind.

Here are a few key tips on how to create your vision statement:

• Describe an ideal future

• Reflect the essence of an organization’s mission and values

• Convey a larger sense of organizational purpose, so that agents see themselves as “building a cathedral” rather than “laying stones”

• The destination, a force pulling you towards the reality of this Vision in the future

Goals

The goals are the incremental steps your team can take everyday towards a common vision.

This will create more team synergy as you all know the vision you are going towards, and you will work together to get there.

Here are some things to consider when outlining your goals:

• Process of small daily improvements

• Slow sustainable growth towards your vision

• Satisfies SMART principles; Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely

Path to Team Synergy

After you’ve narrowed down your Mission, Vision, Values and Goal, you can move onto the path of team synergy with the following steps:

Know Thyself

Understanding yourself better is the first step to becoming more effective when working with others.

You will be able to recognize your strengths as well as understand your limitations and personal growth areas.

Those who understand their natural behavioural preferences are far more likely to pursue the right opportunities, in the right way, at the right time, to get the results they desire.

Learn To Know Others

Every time you expand your perspective of how you think, what makes you move and tick, you are also moving forward to know others. The more you see who you are in comparison to the world, the more you understand how varied the world is.

The top assessments I recommend for team building are DISC personality profiles.

DISC provides a comprehensive overview of the way that people think, act, and interact in their most natural state.

It is the most widely used profiling tool of its kind, and is supported by decades of validation and reliability studies.

We assess the ideal profile for every role prior to hiring and adjust to the team leader and the team members’ personalities for far greater success.

Live In Your GENIUS

I have mentioned the KBCC GENIUS Model multiple times in my past Inman articles.

It’s absolutely that as a team leader, you know your strengths and weaknesses.

This step will allow you to delegate away tasks that cost you time and money in your business to capable team members.

You will then have more time to focus on what you love, earn more money, and have more time overall.

Celebrate The GENIUS Of Others

In order to delegate away tasks that cost you time and money in your business to capable team members, you need to celebrate their GENIUS’s.

G = Genius. These are the tasks that make you happy, energized and excited. You can complete these tasks faster than those who aren’t interested in them.

E = Excellent. These are tasks that you enjoy doing and are good at, but they do not fulfill you like your Genius tasks do.

N = Neutral. You only want to perform these tasks when absolutely necessary.

I = Involving Others. You want someone else to do these tasks for you, but you can’t help but micromanage.

U = Underachieving. These are tasks that you aren’t good at, but that you might not even realize that you’re failing at.

S = Stop. These tasks are trainwrecks when handled by you.

Allow your team members the privilege of moving more and more into their Genius as they evolve with their capabilities and results.

Create a system to transparently identify when additional leverage is available to allow for greater production at a higher calibre and in less time.

All of these steps together will pivot you and your team into deeper connection and synergy, all you have to do is take the first step.

SOURCE: Kathleen Black, KBCC