Building a Team
Without Getting Overwhelmed

For most people, staying balanced while building a team culture is difficult.

It's hard enough to figure out what needs to happen first. Not to mention 4th or 20th. As a QA person I'm sure you find yourself looking far down the road thinking, wondering or worrying about the future.

It's hard to ignore the fears, uncertainties and doubts that come along with all the responsibilities you face on a daily basis.

Not only do you have your job to manage and a team to build, you also keep a life to manage. Maybe you have kids, a husband, a dog, a house, a REAL LIFE to tend!

What's Important Right Now?

But I'm sure if you're like most business people, you find yourself neglecting different aspects of your life as you focus on "what's important." Sometimes growth in one aspect of our lives comes as other parts of our lives are dying.

Since this page focuses on team building to improve QA systems I'm going to focus on how to stay balance while building a team. However this advice applies to many different aspects of your life.

Building a team culture takes patience, commitment and dedication. Too often these three words add up to one specific thing: time. Yet, we all want more time.  Lack of time causes lack of sleep at night, lack of exercise, missed vacations, and valuable missed time with our families. Lack of time makes us unhappy, burned out, and bitter with our lives.

Pulled In Many Directions?

Nowhere is this more apparent than in a team setting. As a leader I'm sure you feel like the team constantly pulls you in multiple different directions:

• your team members ask for "a minute" of your time.
• your problematic personal relationships interfers with progress
• you find it difficult focusing on specific tasks

Business people experience difficulty building teams that work efficiently because their goals and motives do not align.

Team building means sharing goals and facilitating "the team" to meet them. As a leader, If you lost sight of your team goals, then most likely your team members lost them too.

Building a Team Means Letting Go of "Control" to Regain It

That is one of the most powerful aspects of having a team is that you can delegate tasks and ask questions of experts who might have a fresh perspective on a problem that you can't seem to solve. You must give up this false sense of "control" in your business and share the problems, solutions and desired outcome with your team.

Giving up control does not come naturally to most business owners. . . many of us, perfectionists that we are, hang onto a false sense of control with a death-grip. . .

. . . but this is why our lives become unbalanced in the first place.

By building a team of winners and training them to be experts, not only do you establish a team you can trust, communicate, and cooperate with, you allow your life and your business life to come naturally back into balance.

You grant yourself more of what I call "soft space" and power to achieve your goals.

Giving up the need to control often feels like death to many of us. We literally feel like our lives are going to end.

Your resistance is an obstacle to your success, personally and building a team. It prevents you both from living the lifestyle, or having the business you want. It ruins relationships and destroys families.

More about

• Building A Team
• Profiling Team Members
• Building Trust