The 3 Major Principles of a Great Team

If you’re an entrepreneur, chances are your past experiences with teams are something like mine were:

a.) the jumbled, mismatched team at Mr. G’s Handy Hardware, where you worked summers during high school, pasted together with relatives of the owner and people no one knew what they really did anymore; or
b.) the boilerplate corporate team of ACME Amalgamated, your first “real” job, where your team included skill sets hired by HR who were secretly plotting to overthrow and sabotage each other.

In your own small business, you’ll probably want to do better than that. The following three principles will get your team going in the right direction.

1.) Build a culture of interdependence
This is a departure from what you may have known in the past, and it’s key to keeping people loyal, happy, and committed in businesses with small teams. Instead of valuing people who can work independently, start valuing interdependence — people who can work well in a team.

Interdependence is fostered by information sharing, team meetings, encouraging input, and modeling the behavior. Teams that depend on each other have less project hoarding, internal jealousies, and complaints.

2.) Get your people to think and act like owners
Team members who really understand what it means to run a business and are appreciated for their input will bring much more value to the company than those who don’t.

Regular communication and understanding of the direction and vision of the company, training, team building, and a plain old “thank you” every once in awhile will do much to prevent the sense of entitlement that can creep in, as well as the games people resort to when they don’t feel valued as part of a team.

3.) Focus on each person’s value to the organization
Know your people and their strengths, and let them do what they do best. This includes pushing down decision making and problem solving systems, which will keep you from being the bottleneck in your own company.

This approach means problems get solved before they end up on your desk — if you can let team members work out their own solutions, and yes — occasionally fail.