Often times in business, this is what ends up happening: the people that you work with become a greater obstacle than your competitors, or the clients that you have. If you can create opportunities and scenarios for them to come together instead of fall apart, you can ultimately create a champion level team in your business.
There are a couple of different things that it takes to create a champion level team. First off and foremost, they’ve got to have a brightness of the future. Meaning, if you've ever gone into and organization that feels like the life has just been sucked out of them, that's usually because they've taken away the brightness of the future. They've said, “Hey, this year nobody's going to get a raise.” Man, you want to suck the air out of a room? That will happen. So what you want to do is you want to create clear and beneficial goals that have an ending in sight, but that also has a benefit to everybody who works on the team.
So even if, for example, you're in a position where raises are going to be taken away for the year. What are some of the things you're looking forward to? It could be a pizza party on Friday. It could be being able to have a $100 goal, or a $100 bonus for something that they were doing. No matter what it is can you give them something that's close enough distance that they could get excited about, but has a very clear ending in sight.
Number two is you also have to be able to create high frequency of interaction. A lot of companies that I work with from time to time will tell me. “Jason, it's really hard to get us all together on the same place at the same time, because our schedules are all over the place.” But I tell you, the companies that I work for that can create regularly consistent meetings. Even if that's just like a five minutes once a week team huddle. Have a much higher degree of performance, because they can regroup, get on the same page, talk about what the priorities are for the week, and they can move forward. So at least weekly is critical. If you only do once a month, you need to rearrange the schedule, and start having people come in even 15 minutes early. And if you have multiple shifts. Do a meeting where you can do a team meeting in the morning, and then a team meeting for the second shift in the afternoon. That will keep your frequency of interaction high, and keep the morale rocking and rolling for your team.
Number three is you've got to also be able to make and keep agreements, because if you want to build up trust, and trustworthiness, and keep a track record. Even the small things make a huge difference in a business. Meaning if you say you're going to do something, you've got to be able to do it. So it creates that track record of trustworthiness by making and keeping agreements. If you say you're going to send somebody and email. You're going to get back with them at a certain time. Do that, because trust is the thing that takes the longest to build, and it's the easiest to get to go away from you.
So the other thing you need to be able to do, is build and maintain rapport. Meaning you want to use language, tonality, you want to truly be a listener, instead of a talker in your team if you want to build and maintain a rapport with your team.
And lastly, you've got to demand compliance with the rules. Now if I just said rules, and you said, “What rules, our company doesn't have rules?” You probably should start with setting rules, but if you have rules as a part of your organization. You've got to demand compliance with the rules at all levels. Meaning that you've got to be willing to call it, or say something if somebody’s not abiding by the rules. Or also as a leader of the organization, leaders listen very carefully, you must also be willing to be called. Meaning if you're not following the rules, somebody’s got to call you on it. Look, none of us are perfect. We can't all follow the rules every single moment of every single day, but if we're all striving towards the same level of excellence. Then we're creating compliance.
So, if you want to build cooperation on your team. Take those five things, use them in your business, and try and just take one of them on this week, and see if it can increase the value that you bring to the organization. Share those with your team, share this video. Until next week. Have a great week.