Building Better Teams

Michael is the President of Sapir Consulting. He has been providing operational, organizational and management consulting and training for over 14 years. He is a certified project management professional and Gestalt process facilitator, offering training, consulting and solutions development in project and product management, process improvement, leadership and team-building programs.

  Leadership   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

From developing a vision to staying focused on short- and long-term goals, from talking about the tough stuff to having fun whenever possible, these eight traits help project leaders build high-performance teams. Which ones do you already do well, and which ones might you work on?

Building a high performance team is a lot of work, especially for the team leader. But as one manager said, it’s a lot more work to not build a high performance team. Some leaders consistently demonstrate the traits necessary to make their teams into high performance teams. They can be taken out of one team, dropped into another and within 18 months, they’ll have made the second team into a high performance team. Whether their old team stays high performance or not will depend upon the leadership traits of the new team leader.

Develop a Vision

More than anything, team leaders of high performance teams are visionary leaders. They don’t start by looking at where their team is; they start by looking at where they want their team to be. Based on that, they work their way backwards, to figure out how to get there.

A vision is a picture of where you want to get to; not the path to get there. It’s what the team will look like, when it’s arrived. But just having a vision isn’t enough; the team leader must become infectious with that vision, getting their …

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