Build your team, build your life
Posted in webcast on January 18th, 2010 by MiriusAttracting the best people to your team is clearly the key making your support team more effective and thus accelerating your progress towards your goal, but how do you convince those people to work with you and not someone else? If they are good then they will already have other people who want to work with them.
The answer of course is to stand out from the crowd, but not in a wearing a loud shirt sort of way, rather it’s to have a reputation as the guy who gets things done, the guy who can be relied upon. They are building their teams just as you are and would you rather have the expert who can’t be relied upon or the guy who is good and makes sure to put you first? It cuts both ways, but how do you get that reputation?
The problem with this approach is clearly that it won’t work at first, but the more you work on solving this, the better your reputation will become and better your future team will become. You might even by example be able to turn the average team you first attract into the best team; the team others want to steal away from you.
Route to Success
The route to success in this is to go the extra mile. This works for you as much as it works to build your reputation because it will transform your own results from mediocre to outstanding. The downside to it is that it really reinforces the concept that you cannot do everything and that you need to sacrifice goals which are less important or which perhaps are not relevant any more.
It is also easy to become resentful of the extra effort required to go the extra mile, and martyrdom will counteract the benefits you are seeking to create, so make sure that you maintain the positive mental attitude and do the extra mile because you want to. Remember that most people will fail to complete the first mile never mind complete the second one so this will really make you stand out.
Each time you perform the same service you will seek to do it better. Better might simply be in terms of doing it more efficiently so that you complete it faster, or it might be a higher quality product, but either way it will make your work excel and that will make you much more attractive to the other team members and to potential team members.
Expand Your Mind
One of the best results of this exercise is that it will improve your imagination as you constantly seek to find better ways of doing things. That is an area where your team will be able to provide you with very useful feedback because they will consider the problem from different viewpoints and while they are unlikely to provide the solutions you need to improve, they are likely to provide you will the inspiration for where to look in order to find the solutions.
