What Does Real Team Alignment Look Like? – Behind the Scenes
Getting your team to perform at a higher level is a big part of your job as a great leader. One essential element of growth has team alignment, that is a competitive advantage. But you have to build your ideals of team alignment on the right framework. In today’s short video behind the scenes, we look at “what does real team alignment look like?” Getting a higher level of team alignment will give you a loyal, focused team and the ability to adapt to the challenges ahead.
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Team Alignment: The Transcript
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Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.
[0:00]
Getting your team to perform at a higher level is a big part of your job as the leader of this team, if you’re the CEO or the founder of a company that’s growing fast, then you understand team alignment is a very important element to your growth. But you want the kind of team alignment, that is a competitive advantage.
[0:17]
You don’t want just alignment of people that think the same. And you know, kind of say yes to you, and all the times you want to kind of team alignment that drives success, I get a chance to talk with a lot of the founders and CEOs of the fastest-growing companies with what I do the podcast, the things, the videos that you’re listening to here is me sharing back ideas from these interviews. And I work with some of these leaders as an executive coach. And when I say team alignment, one of the things that I see is the big problem is that your vision or framework, if you will, for Team alignment is all wrong.
[0:53]
You see, I will admit, I’ve actually used this wrong framework before, but I started thinking about it and challenging my own thoughts within my team, and with the teams of my clients. And I thought about that classical crew boat, right, the crew boat where there’s someone yelling, for them to row actually don’t know what they say. But that is the typical vision for what team alignment looks like. But here’s where it’s wrong. It’s great for that sport, I think that sport is a beautiful way to look at it one version of team alignment. But in the business world, it’s much more like a baseball team or a football team. Because you don’t have just everybody playing one position that kind of looks the same and does the same. In our businesses, we have different people in different roles.
[1:39]
The way your salespeople approach their work is very different from your developers are coders and your customer service people and your marketing people, operations, logistics, whatever your business is, you have these various types of people that have different personalities and talents. And so you as a leader, to get team alignment, when everyone is so different, is a big challenge. You’ve probably known this, you probably even said yourself, managing the work is easy. But leading the people is hard. I say this all the time with my clients, I say it on stages when I get to talk to people. But today I want to share with you what can you do as a leader of a fast-growing team to create a deeper sense of team alignment more like the baseball team, because you just can’t do it the way rope crew boat does it. All that being said, here are some new ideas that you can do today, due tomorrow, due this week, to make your team a better-aligned team. So here we go.
[2:38]
One of the things that you can do is have when you see that everyone is different, you can try to tune into all the differences across the team. So if you have six direct reports, understanding what drives them forward, what keeps them from moving forward? What are the things that they like? What are the things they don’t like? Those are all done in individual conversations. These are not your typical conversations where you’re delegating a new project, or you’re kind of just checking in, they really are meant to have deeper conversations of what do they want to create, what were they moving. And all that being said, it really is about you understanding who that person is as an individual. When you also think about what you want to do is find out what their goals are. And I your job as a leader is to do something I call shared goals is to find out what skills or what talents or what experiences they want to have inside their time working with you. So that you can actually find alignment between what the company wants and what the person wants.
[3:38]
For example, I’m gonna go back into my own career, where I was working for a company and I wanted to understand sales, I really wanted to get out of the technical world of project management, and the technical aspects of building products. And I wanted to move into sales. Well, the company that gave me a chance to do that was something that really meant a lot to me. And so I was building my skills in sales, but I was also helping the company out. And my direct leader of that the CEO of the company was in tune with, I really wanted to learn this. And so I put my heart and soul into it. Your job is to find how others can put their heart and soul into it through this shared goal process. Another way to do it is to have conversations, what I call stake conversations to have nothing to do with delegations.
[4:22]
They’re just like, you know, how are things going for you here? How could we improve? How can I improve as a leader, you have that kind of questions that allow you to tune into what’s really going on for that person. And when you really look at all of these things, you can actually create a better team alignment that goes deeper than what you currently have. And I remember a client of mine was struggling to create the kind of team elaborate he wanted. He’s like, you know, we read free snacks. We have these beanbag chairs. We have ping pong tables, we have all this stuff. That’s fun. That’s what they told us they wanted but we still don’t have the kind of alignment that I feel like we could have. And so we unpack what that was through the coaching conversations. And what came to is he wasn’t providing any kind of career development programs, he wasn’t really helping people improve their own skill sets, and really helping them grow as individual employees, which was also, you know, not very good for the company as well.
[5:18]
So he started changing some of the funds to the fun stuff, it’s hard to say. But he started putting that into career development, doing different things Lunch and Learn series, bringing in some speakers bringing in different things that people really wanted to do. And it wasn’t that expensive to be able to provide this new level of employee growth. So those are just some of the examples you can use as a leader to create more team alignment. If you want to go and look at the foundational elements I’ve looked at across the 10 elements of fast-growth companies, those 10 fundamentals, you can actually go take this test absolutely yourselves absolutely free. Just go to Teamalignmentscorecard.com It will give you a way to score yourself and see where you are, where you could use some improvement. But it’ll give you a place where you can actually see exactly where your team alignment is and where you can grow. And I say all this because I want to help you grow as a leader. I want your team to have the kind of team alignment, that there really is a competitive advantage. And I want you to lead that charge and go to Teamalignmentscorecard.com you can do it now.
[6:22]
My name is Gene Hammett. I work with founder CEOs and their teams to help them grow beyond where they are today. I help them get more clear about what’s going on, removes them the blind spots, and help them really pushed beyond the barriers and challenged them. So if you have any questions about your own growth, make sure you reach out to me go check out some of the free resources at genehammett.com, and as always lead with courage. We’ll see you next time.
Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.
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