Five Pillars of Team Building for Extraordinary Businesses

Five Pillars of Team Building for Extraordinary Businesses

Every team, strong or weak, tells the story of its leadership. As co-authors Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker stated: “The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.”

At Aepiphanni, we believe extraordinary leaders will build strong, extraordinary teams by implementing five practices into their leadership style.

They are:

  1. They model extraordinary habits they want to see carried out in the workplace.
  2. They set hard-to-reach individual and team goals, pushing their team out of their comfort zone.
  3. They incorporate a transformational leadership style.
  4. They encourage an inspired, collaborative work culture.
  5. They champion communication between team members and leaders.

Model Extraordinary Habits

Leaders set the tone of how they want their company to operate.  That’s why it’s so important for leaders to model habits they want to see emulated by their employees. They don’t just “talk the talk”—they “walk the walk.” Talk is cheap, and actions speak louder than words. Those may sound like cliché phrases but having this pro-active mindset will benefit you as a leader.

It’s easy to bark out orders and threaten termination if deadlines aren’t met, but in doing so you will only elicit fear from your team. They will not respect you as a man or woman of integrity. Both good and bad habits take time to be developed. Leading by an extraordinary example is much harder because it requires discipline.

Push Your Team to Extraordinary Limits

There’s truth in the saying, “No pain, no gain.” Pushing your team to attain hard-to-reach goals that align with your company’s vision is necessary to achieve success. In an article in Forbes magazine, the author reiterates that, “Unlike achievable and realistic goals that leave you stuck in the status-quo, HARD Goals light up the brain and encourage great performance. A truly effective goal should push and challenge you to achieve great things.” Reaching for challenging goals allows your team members to amplify their capabilities.

Incorporate a Transformational Leadership Style

A transformational leadership style is one in which the leader encourages innovation and independence among team members by “stepping back” and allowing employees to collaborate on projects, while also nurturing individual skills of star team members.

On the Langston.edu website, an article on transformational leadership quotes, “Transformational leadership is defined as a leadership approach that causes change in individuals and social systems. In its ideal form, it creates valuable and positive change in the followers with the end goal of developing followers into leaders.”

Remember in our previous article where we said that the end goal of extraordinary leadership was to develop extraordinary leaders? Instead of taking a traditional approach to leadership where you’re constantly giving orders, try taking a step back to encourage team members to take initiative with certain goals and see where it takes your company. You’d be surprised.

Encourage Collaboration

Extraordinary leaders encourage an inspired, collaborative workplace culture. Collaboration between team members leads to goals being met. According to one article, “Business collaboration is leveraging internal and external connections to generate ideas, find solutions, and achieve common goals for your business.” Two heads are better than one, right? Think of how much faster a project gets done when you have more than one person at a time working on it. Collaboration is genius in that it teaches compromise and how to work with others, while at the same time cutting costs, amplifying production, and generating a peaceful, collaborative workplace culture.

Champion Communication

Clear communication is key in any company, big or small. This idea of clear communication encompasses communication between business and client, between manager and employee, and between team members. Many times, effective communication implies listening as much as talking—sometimes, even more so. “To learn how to listen well, paraphrase what was said to show that you are listening and to verify accuracy. This will reduce the likelihood of conflict and will help you become a more effective communicator,” as one author stated in a piece published to Fremont.edu. Clear communication paves the way for productivity. As an extraordinary leader, you also must communicate your vision, goals, and practices in a way that gets your employees excited to make their own impact in the company

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