Ten Surefire Ways to Create a Team of Winners

 

 

 

 

Want to be an excellent leader? A truly inspirational, effective agent of your team’s success? There is literally nothing harder – or more important – in the world of work. That’s why effective leaders are so rare in real life.

If that discourages you, them maybe you don’t have what it takes to lead after all. If it motivates you instead? Well, then, here are a few tips to take it from “in charge guy/gal” to “excellent leader !”

1. Repeat after me (to your team): “My job is to help you be successful by making your job easier.”
No, your job is not to give them the day off to shop while you finish up their work for them. But your job as leader – your only job, as leader – is to remove impediments and provide the tools for your people’s success. Take the obstacles out of their way and give them the resources so they can do the important work of your company: serving your customers and stakeholders!

2. Foster friendships among your staff.
After work socialization is important – it is! But nothing builds camaraderie and team spirit like shared success as the result of shared struggle. What’s your team’s greater goal? What significant challenges are you confronting that all of you can be proud of overcoming together?

3. Reward for the big things. And the medium things. And even the itty-bitty little things. 

We like praise. We want recognition. One winner-takes-all vacation or mega-bonus for the year’s top performer is great and all, but how about a $5 gift card, or even a made-up certificate from your printer, because someone filed her report on time? 

4. Push them.
People of quality want to be good at their jobs. Kindly help them to improve. …Kindly, but maybe not gently.

5. Release the “Just Enoughers” to other “opportunities.”
We all know the “Just Enoughers.” Employees that do just enough to avoid getting fired. No one likes to work with slackers – except other slackers. Redeploy them sooner than later. As the old saying goes, “If it’s inevitable, make it immediate.”

6. Hire slowly and caaaaarefully!
Show your current team members and your new recruits that not just anybody belongs on your team. If you want to build an elite group, hire top performers. You’ll have to kiss a lot of frogs as you vet the talent pond.

7. Give them something important to get up for in the morning.
Remember number 2, with the part about shared challenges? Pick a lofty goal. Then make pursuit of that the rallying cry of your team. Change lives, change how business is done; don’t just settle to change who wins this year’s sales contest. 

8. Talk up your people to others.
Talk your team up to your peers, to their peers, to your boss and her boss and heck, to the security guard, too. Be proud of each of them, and share that pride with anyone who’ll listen. Word will filter back to them, and as it does, it will have have a major impact. 

9. Expect the world of them.
Establish with your team how highly you respect and admire them. Expect big things from them. They will live up to your image of them, no matter what it takes.

10. Be worthy of their effort.
Want to really be the best, most effective leader ever? Work to improve yourself every day, in every way that is important to your team’s success. In order to lead a group of champions to new heights, you as leader must be worthy of the team’s time and energy. And that’s a lot more than we have room for in one blog post.

You will never be as good as you can be as a leader. But every hour of every day, if you’re sufficiently devoted to the success of your team, you can improve. Keep at it, and your people will start bragging about you – to their peers, your peers, your boss and her boss. And yes, even to the security guards.

When it percolates back to you how admired you are by those you serve as leader… you’ll be infinitely prouder than if they told you themselves! 

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement ? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, energy storage, facility services & maintenance, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

 

 

How to Delegate Across, Not Down

  

 

 

 

 

 

Leader's Digest: Tip of Day

As you move up the leadership ladder, getting work done through peers—not just direct reports—becomes an essential skill. But delegating laterally requires nuance, not just authority. Here’s how to do it effectively.

Choose the right tasks to delegate. Only delegate work that fits your peer’s domain, advances their goals, or uses their existing tools. Misaligned asks feel like favors and are likely to get a quick “no.”

Frame it as a shared opportunity. Start with context, not commands. Acknowledge their expertise and position the work as a mutual win: “Would it make sense for your team to own this going forward?” Keep the tone collaborative.

Create accountability together. Get clear on timelines and roles. Ask, “What check-ins work for you?” or “What’s a realistic timeline?” When needed, be up front about hard deadlines. After the conversation, follow up with an email summarizing the agreements you’ve made.

Address pushback with curiosity. If you hear hesitation, ask why: “What concerns do you have?” or “What’s your team juggling right now?” Use their input to revise scope or timing without forcing the issue.

Follow up without overstepping. Instead of “Is this done?” which can make them feel like you’re checking up on them, ask “What obstacles can we help clear?” Revisit shared agreements if needed, and keep things moving—respectfully.

To your greater success with delegating across the organization,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement ? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, energy storage, facility services & maintenance, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

 

Resolving Team Personality Conflicts by Fostering Pyschological Safety

  

 

Dear Coach Mclees~

In my experience, it is easier to work on teams with people who are alike.  When people are really different, it seems like there is much more friction on the team. I am now a manager of a team that has a lot of different types of people, and I don’t know how I can create a cohesive, well-running team with this group. It seems like it might be easier to change out some of the team members, but that doesn’t seem right or fair. How can I get everyone to work well together?

Signed,
Dilemma of Differences

Dear Dilemma~  

It can be hard to interact with and meaningfully connect with someone who is different from us. The more we differ, the further apart we are, the harder it is to build a bridge. Why? Because most of our relationship skills are grounded in finding commonalities. When those commonalities are subtle or scarce, we struggle to connect.

So, if difference is hard and commonality is easy, why choose hard over easy? There are several good reasons, but here are two:

Values: We choose diversity because we believe in human dignity and equality. You hint at this yourself when you mention that it doesn’t seem right to let someone go or transfer them simply because they are different. You are right. It isn’t right.

Results: We choose difference because there is good research that shows that when a team brings different perspectives, experiences, and approaches together with respect and care, we get better results than we would from a homogeneous team.

Of course, there is a major qualification on that last statement that is also at the heart of your question – how the diverse team comes together is crucial to tapping into the power of our differences. 

Amy Edmonson and a legion of other scholars have convincingly shown that the key ingredient for a team coming together well is psychological safety—not liking, not socializing, not commonality (although all those factors can help create psychological safety).

As Dr. Edmonson defines it, psychological safety is “the belief that work environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” It is “the experience of being able to speak up with relative ideas, questions, or concerns. It is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able—even obligated—to be candid.” Our work over the last 30 years has shown us that teams with high psychological safety get better ideas on the table, creating a smarter group and better solutions.

One of the interesting characteristics of psychological safety is that it is inherently a team dynamic. It doesn’t exist in any meaningful way at the individual or organizational level. It lives and breathes (and dies) at the team level.

So, if you want your team to work together well and you accept that psychological safety is the key, how do you build it? Here are three things to do to get started.

1.   Measure.  Dr. Don Berwick, CEO of IHI, says that “a measure is the shadow of your heart.” If we sincerely care about something and want to change it, we will measure it. So, start by assessing where your team is in terms of their level of psychological safety and then decide on what would be a reasonable level of improvement. Surveys are an effective way to assess how psychologically safe people.

Continue to measure through regular pulse surveys. This is not a one-and-done. You need to evaluate whether what you are doing is increasing psychological safety (in which case, keep doing it!) or not (in which case, you need to try something else).

    Questions you can use to measure psychological safety:

• If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.
• Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
• People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.
• It is safe to take a risk on this team.
• It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
• No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
• Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.  

      Note: Use a Likert scale.

2.   Choose a Generous View. At the very heart of psychological safety is the belief that I won’t be judged negatively for being me. Unsurprisingly, it is the negative judgments we make about one another that, more than almost anything else, destroy psychological safety.

To create psychological safety, we need to consciously and consistently choose a more generous view of others. This isn’t an exercise in imagination or a rationalization of bad behavior. I am not advising we simply pretend that everyone and everything is great. Rather, I am suggesting that if we can suspend judgement and replace it with curiosity, we will be better able to hold space for the universal contradiction that good people do bad (or even just annoying) things.

3.  Maintain Good Intention. Dr. Edmonson asserts that psychological safety is neither created nor destroyed by the content of our conversations. It is entirely dependent upon the perception of intent in the conversation.

If you want to create safety in a conversation, a relationship, or a team, start by cultivating good intent and then sharing it. Sharing your good intention out loud can have a powerful positive impact on those around you. It lets them know what your motives and intentions are. It also helps you stay accountable to and connected with that good intent even when issues pop up that might otherwise irritate or frustrate you.

Your team may never become “besties.” But that shouldn’t be your goal. Solid friendships don’t always equal high performance; people may love being on a low performing team with high comradery. Building a high-performing team that learns together, achieves results, and respects one another is a much more worthy goal and one that is within reach of all teams.

 Click here to read a related post:  5 Super Team Building Strategies from NFL Football (5 min read)

To your greater ability to build real teamwork,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

 Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, third-party maintenance providers, real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

Empathy Is a Core Leadership Skill

 

 

 

 

 

Leader's Digest: Tip of Day

Many leaders dismiss empathy as an optional, “touchy-feely” skill. But failing to demonstrate it can lead to low morale, poor retention, and a culture where people withhold ideas and concerns. If you want to drive better results, use these strategies to make empathy part of how you lead—consistently and clearly.

Start with a shared definition. Without agreement on what empathy actually is, your team will default to assumptions. Collectively define empathetic behaviors—for example, perspective-taking and respectful disagreement—and be specific about how they show up in your team.

Be other-focused. Empathy means making space for others to feel heard, not filling the silence with your own experiences. Be present. Listen deeply. Ask open-ended questions. Resist the urge to rescue or relate.

Balance support with structure. Understand individual circumstances without sacrificing team needs. Use empathy to gather perspectives, co-create solutions, and adjust expectations—while maintaining accountability for team and individual goals.

Protect your energy. Empathy doesn’t mean overextending. Set boundaries, model emotional regulation, and avoid “empathic distress” by facilitating—not absorbing—others’ emotions.

Choose words that connect. Avoid dismissive phrases like “At least…” or “I know how you feel.” Instead, validate experiences, acknowledge emotions, and offer curiosity without judgment.

Click here to read a related post about how to be empathic at work.

 To your greater ability to be empathic,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement ? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, energy storage, facility services & maintenance, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

 

3 Strategies Leaders Can Deploy When They're Overworked and Understaffed

 

When managers are overloaded as many are now, the usual leadership advice is to delegate more. But what if you’ve delegated everything you can and you still have too much work? If your team is drowning too, delegating more work simply means shifting the overload. This is not a sustainable option.

I’ve seen this situation many times working with leaders and teams. Fortunately, there are three key strategies you can use to reassess and reconfigure the work you do to free up your limited time and capacity.

1.   Redefine “good enough.” Not every task requires an A+ effort. Set clear expectations around what “fit-for-purpose” quality looks like—for yourself and your team. That means intentionally assessing what level of effort makes sense for a given piece of work. Do you discuss what is “good enough” for specific assignments with your team members? Or what corners should be cut? 

     If you and your team are too busy, it’s essential to take time to figure out how to work differently. 

     Ask yourself and discuss with your team:

Where could you do B-quality work, cut corners, or streamline processes to save yourself time and energy? For example, can you shorten weekly updates? Can you send bullet points instead of narratives? Do you really need a full project plan if the situation is simple?

What agreements could you make with your boss to simplify or reduce deliverables and processes? For example, could you tell your boss that it would be helpful if you could send simpler or fewer communications? Will a rough draft suffice instead of a perfect document to get the information across? Can a decision-making process be streamlined?  

Clarify where you can simplify or cut corners without sacrificing impact.

How can AI support you and your team in reducing time required for “good enough” work? Ask your team what apps they are starting to experiment with and encourage them to do more. For example, meeting summary apps have gotten really good. First draft writing apps are also helpful. 

When managers and teams step back to assess if there are tasks on which they can lower the bar strategically, the answer is almost always yes, and encouraging “good enough” work energizes the team.

2.   Eliminate low-value work. Hidden, habitual tasks often waste the most time. Ask your team: “What would we stop doing if we lost a workday each week?” Go beyond surface-level cuts. Reassess reports, approvals, and processes—many are more about tradition than value. And remember that if a change doesn’t work, you can always reverse it.

We all know it’s important to eliminate low-value tasks, however, in coaching leaders I've sees that many low-value tasks have become unconscious habits, hidden in plain sight. Even teams that have worked on streamlining stop too soon and miss opportunities. There are many more hours to be saved if you look deeper.

In my experience, it consistently takes two rounds of “looking” to get people to identify all of the tasks they could offload or reduce.

Here is a simple offloading process you can use with your team:

• Ask your team, in advance of an offloading session, to think of all the tasks that could be eliminated. In the actual session they will often first come up with things that other people can stop doing. That’s fine. It gets them warmed up.
• Then ask them to go deeper and think about what work they themselves could stop doing if they had one day less per week to work? This is when I've typically seen breakthroughs.
• Of course, you need to make sure that eliminating work does not negatively impact customers, colleagues, or finance.

3.  Strategically reduce your availability. Always being accessible increases your team’s dependence on you. Step out of projects where your presence isn’t critical. Shift to check-ins or on-request advising, reduce meeting time, and explore asynchronous updates. Freeing up your time empowers others to step up and lead.

Many leaders think they should always be available. But too much availability creates more interactions and makes team members more dependent on you than necessary or ideal. With a bit more space, your team members will experience more room to act and this frees up time for you too.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What projects or initiatives are you too involved in now? What could you step out of completely?

• How could you scale back your involvement and still provide colleagues with what they need?

• Are more asynchronous updates possible?

• Can you attend only the relevant parts of meetings? Or only key decision-making meetings?

• Could you try 15-minute catch-ups with direct reports or colleagues instead of longer meetings?

Be creative in removing yourself where you can (and helping your team do the same), and tell colleagues why, so they understand your motivation.

When you are overloaded and delegating more to your team isn’t an option, there are still ways to free up capacity. Now is the time to reassess and be intentional about what you do and how you do it. Working in a fit-for-purpose way that matches appropriate effort with true need, removing habitual low-value work, and being strategically unavailable will enable you and your team to free up vital time and energy for what matters.

PS. Many managers don't delegate properly. Click here to learn what you can do to develop the capacity of your team with delegation.

To your greater success and well-being,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement ? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, energy storage, facility services & maintenance, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

 

 

Delegating to Build the Capacity of Your Team to Achieve Greater Results

 

 

 

 

 

Delegation is an essential skill that most of the leaders I've taught and coached over the past 30 years have struggled with in varying degrees. Think how much more your team could do if you became an effective delegator and developed your direct reports to become as capable as you are. 

Think of the important work you could do if you could delegate more things to your team members. Think about how much more energy you could put into leading your team to the next level if you could clear your plate of some of the work you have now.

One of the biggest tools you have for development is delegating. It’s important to think about delegating not just as assigning work, but as a technique for teaching, developing, and building capacity in your team.

The only true way to develop a potential successor is to delegate parts of your job so that someone else can practice doing it. By delegating tasks and projects to someone as though you were developing them as a potential successor, you are actually maximizing that person’s development. 

Think about getting a couple of your high potential employees (HPE) ready to step into your job. What could be more impactful to increasing the capacity of your team? This is relevant at every level of leadership. 

Here are three important ways to use the succession idea as you delegate for maximum development.  And if your goal is in fact to develop a successor, these are still the right things to do:

1. Let them practice your work.

The first part of someone learning your job is about the work. You need to give them opportunities to practice working at your level.

A lot of times we think the way to motivate our employees is to have them work on the most fun or interesting projects or the less important things. That works to a point, but it does not do anything to help get a high potential employee ready for your job. Face it, how much fun work do you get to do?

You need to give them opportunities to practice the difficult, mind-numbing, controversial, boring, unsupported, no-win kind of work you deal with every day when you wake up. 

What is the hardest and most distasteful thing you own? That’s what you give your high potential person! You give them the benefit off seeing what it is really like to be in your shoes. 

They get to suffer like you do. But they get to work on bigger stuff. They get access to your network and stakeholders. They have the chance to do something creative and heroic to get this done.

2. Let them practice your relationships.

The next part of getting someone ready for your job is to make sure they are practiced and comfortable with the social requirements at the next level. They need to be someone that your peers feel comfortable with and want to include personally. They can’t stand out like a sore thumb as the junior person in the room, who has no basis for being there

You need to give your employee a chance to practice these relationships. Give them opportunities to present for you. Arrange one-on-one meetings with them and your peers. Send them as your delegate to your boss’s staff meeting when you are out of town. (Go out of town if this never happens.) If your  employee does not develop personal relationships with your boss and peers, they will not be capable of stepping in for you to free you up—because they will not be given the chance.

3. Let them practice your decisions.

Okay. Here is where the rubber meets the road. You need to give someone  a chance to practice making the decisions that you make. If you never delegate important decisions, you are fooling yourself that you are truly developing someone.

Think about the next few months of decisions you need to make: priorities, partnerships, product road map choices, mar­keting strategies. Give your HPE the task of owning the project and making the decisions. 

Let them feel the pressure of owning the outcome fully. Let them get the experience explaining, defending, and selling their choices. Let them get the experience fixing it if it goes wrong.

Is this scary? Yes. Might they choose wrong? Yes. Might they choose better than you? Also yes. The point is, if you never let them own and make key decisions, you are cutting off the single most important training you can give your successor. They will  never be ready for your job without owning key decisions.

Warning! Failure is the Key to Delegating 

 "Delegation requires the willingness to pay for short term failures in order to gain long term competency." --Dave Ramsey

Delegating some of your decisions opens up the risk of people getting it wrong. This can be scary but it is one of the most powerful ways that we all learn. There is no learning as great as that which comes after failing. 

Many managers treat delegating exactly the opposite, as if it is their role to prevent failure by watching closely, jumping in and taking over, and fixing or modifying if it is not going well. If you think about this from a learning perspective, what you have just done is to ensure that no real learning occurs. 

By always averting failure personally, you inadvertently take away the person’s motivation, need, ability to learn and ultimately, real psychological ownership.
 
It’s kind of like teaching a child to ride a bike, by holding on and running alongside—and then never letting go—ever. For the rest of your life, you’ll be running alongside, holding on to prevent the potential fall. Think how much farther they could ride, and how many new things they could discover, if you weren’t still hanging on, running alongside and slowing them down. 

So what happens if someone fails?

Well, when you fail it feels bad. It is embarrassing. It causes business problems,  It causes trouble for other people—so it becomes  a big personal motivator to fix it! Real learning occurs when you not only see  what you did wrong, but need to live with and deal with the consequences of what you did wrong.

By creating the safety net and filling in all the hard parts for them, the person never really learns and never gets to truly experience what it means to succeed. But if you let a bright person fail, they will figure it out. Isn’t that how you got good at what you do? By doing it—trial and error, feedback, trying again. A capable person will learn how to really do it well if you give them a chance.

Also, if you always swoop in to save the day, you are ensuring that they will never get any better at the task than you are. You are putting an artificial cap on their development. Why not give them the chance to get even better at it than you are?

Check out two related posts:

Emotional Intelligence and the Fine Art of Failure. (5 min read)   

More Yoda, Less Superhero (5 min read)

I've delegated things that I thought I was pretty good at, and had my employee blow me away with their ability to exceed my capabilities. This, to me, is one of the best parts of leadership—when you can say, “Wow, that’s amazing. You did that better than I ever imagined it could be done. Bravo. Thank you. Look at this new capability my team now has!”

To your and your team's greater capability,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, energy storage, facility services & maintenance, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services,  real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.