Building an Effective Team

“Forming true community often runs contrary to how most leaders lead,” write Michael Koetje and Peter Blair in the Exchange Essentials article collection, “Building an Effective Team.”

They describe their vision of how to help create true teamwork: “The first thing on our list is hiring passionate, motivated people. We want people who love children, families, themselves, and life, express a desire to be a part of something larger than themselves, and want to join a community and contribute to its growth. Then we give them lots of autonomy and support them. Goethe said, ‘Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.’ Most leaders develop their own vision and encourage others to join them in attaining that vision. We feel that in order to develop community you must develop a common vision with your staff, one that everyone feels a part of, and thus, empowered to create change to attain that vision.”

And in his popular leadership book, Idea Magnets, Mike Brown gives his take on cultivating great teamwork:

“To build a talented team with the greatest depth and potential for strategic and creative collaborations, use these criteria to assess how collaborative a team member might be. Team members should:

• “Share similar core values to those shaping the team;
• Bring something different (and complementary) to the team’s other talents and capabilities;
• Demonstrate motivation to invest in making the collaboration as successful as possible;
• Be enthusiastic about the possibilities from collaborating;
• Display a commitment to mutual learning and benefits from collaboration.”

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