Building Your Team: Don't Clone Yourself

Do you wish that you could clone yourself?

Imagine the possibilities. Your one man band could be a one man BAND. Your team could be filled with people who meet your expectations exactly. Wouldn't that be great?

No. That would not be great. And yet so often we are tempted to try to do that, even though it is (currently!) impossible. How? By hiring people like us. By hiring people and staffing our teams with people who remind us of us. By doing our best to create the team of our dreams filled with the perfect people: copies of ourself.

Except, you wouldn't really like a whole team of you. Your problems would be magnified. Your weaknesses would be multiplied. And your sense of judgement, unregulated by any kind of diversity, would pull you right over a cliff.

Building your team does not mean cloning yourself.

Instead, building your team means finding diverse talent, people who are creative, people who are strong enough to disagree with you, and people who surprise you with both their powerful strengths AND their occasional challenges.

Build your team with pieces that fit because they're both different and flexible. Build your team with people who are so different from you that they push and challenge you. Build your team for the mission, not for the look. Because as attractive and wonderful as you are, one of you is enough.

-- Doug Smith

Our training program "Supervising for Success" includes valuable and instantly usable ideas on how to build your team. Contact me today about bringing this two-day training program to your location.

doug@dougsmithtraining.com

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Perfect Relationships

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Strategic and Communication Skills

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How to Bring Our Workshops To Your Location

Are you getting the high performance leadership training that you need? My company specializes in helping front line leaders -- supervisors -- deliver on their promises, solving problems, and achieving their goals while enjoying their jobs again. I invite you to email me today here: doug@frontrangeleadership.com ...to find out how these interactive workshops can develop your talent fast and affordably. Supervising for Success - a great way to get supervisors off to a great start, or to adjust some rough areas. Communicating for Results - a workshop dedicated to developing deeper conversations, more productive meetings, and more influential presentations. Building Your Team - identifying the keys to your team's success and learning the tools that can help you collaborate on that success. Solving Problems - Creating the collaborative space for success so that project teams, in-tact teams, and organizations can solve the problems that trouble them. Ach...

Time Changes Everything

Do you sense the pace of change? Is life vastly different than what you remember it to be when you were a child? Things do keep changing. Sometimes unexpectedly. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes not. As leaders, it's our job to facilitate change. We're here to lead others in the direction of improvement, for the cause of positive change. Not every leader acts that way, but some part of every leader does believe that they have the right changes to bring about. Part of every leader's job is to make certain that the changes we create ARE for the better. It's our strength of character that keeps our acts of courage helpful. To do that, we need to know how to best align our goals with our mission and our mission with our vision. We need to know what it is that energizes our people. And, we need to mobilize our people by inspiring them with an important mission to begin with. Change driven in the direction of our mission makes all the difference in the...

Make Every Answer Count

Do your people ask you a lot of questions? I remember as a supervisor getting tons of questions, so many in fact that I appointed my number two (who was smarter than me at the technical details anyway) in charge of any question focused on the technical details. That freed me up to answer questions about discipline, vacations, team orientations, training, or the occasional rambling series of questions meant to just spend some quality time with the boss. I'm thinking of you, Carl. It feels flattering to get so many questions. I must be smart, and I must have answers if so many people ask. That is only partly true, but I did learn that how I answered each question mattered. How the supervisor answers questions largely determines how valued each team member feels. There's a line wide enough to park your car on between answering too much and answering too little. Supervisors have lots of attitude. They also have lots of work to do, so it's tempting to give the briefest of ...

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