Effective Teamwork & Level 5 Leadership

What gives some teams the discipline to establish and maintain effective teamwork throughout the entire business?

I don't use the term "discipline" lightly. Obviously, specific processes encourage teamwork on certain teams and other processes discourage teamwork on others.

People want to belong to something that works. When someone's personal success coincides with the team's success, logically they work well together.

Effective Leaders Give Away Responsibility

Building teamwork breaks down the psychological barriers between people.

It's nearly impossible to maintain a sense of teamwork in the corporate cubicle universe. Not only do employees waste their time and talents on things that don't matter to the organization, your team wastes time, money, and energy on them.

Encourage Effective Teamwork Without Becoming Cliche

Typical corporate life is the enemy of "ownership mentality", both on your team and in your business. You only have to experience it for a short while to see why "teams" don't work.

To go against the status quo is suicide right? Many folks would say no. With faith and unrelenting discipline to change the status quo you can encourage teamwork and create the changes you want to see in your business.

But you must have faith. Half-stepping won't cut it here.

Humility as a Business Strategy? Are You a Level 5 Leader

To encourage teamwork and grant people a sense of belonging and autonomy, you must understand their basic needs and align the purpose of your business to meet them.

Give your team what it needs. Many leaders believe you must carry a huge ego around and a will of stone to succeed leading a team. Evidence shows this is not true.

Jim Collins writes convincingly about "Level 5" leadership in his book "Good To Great". For your team these ideas are readily applicable to foster and maintain teamwork starting today.

Breakthroughs happen when you align People with Values, Purpose, and Action

By exploring your personal values and purpose and understanding peoples' basic underlying needs you then structure your business around them:

1) The Core Reason For Existing
2) Core Intrinsic Values
3) Aspirations For the Future

Influential leaders assess and get to the core of their business. They align their team's values and purpose with the overarching goals of the organization.

You can encourage effective teamwork by identifying your team's alignment and obstacles. Define the trouble spots, employees' complaints and customers' issues. Most of the time these "sticky spots" are misalignments within your team's values or purpose.

I'm not trying to suggest this is an easy process, it takes critical, clear-headed, disciplined thought and personal humility to take a good hard look at these issues. On a brighter note, developing solutions and effective processes to fix the holes becomes so much easier when you know exactly what you're trying to fix.