Top 4 secrets to building an effective team: DEAM

We are not always fortunate to inherit an A-team, but we can make it one.

Photo by Guy Kawasaki on Unsplash

Often, Diversity is quoted as the key to building an effective team. Diversity of background, thoughts, experience, and history is crucial to a successful team. However, what can you do as a leader to improve your teams? You must adopt four critical factors to ensure your teams are high-performing and impactful. After many discussions with other leaders from various industries, including manufacturing, Information technology, Pharmaceuticals, Entertainment, and restaurants, I landed on four industry-agnostic elements to help any Leader make their team an A-team.

As we all remember Acronyms well, this four-element model is called DEAM: Develop, Empower, Accelerate Learning, and Mentor. Let’s take a deeper look into each of these elements.

1. Develop — Understand the key strengths of each individual in your team and develop their role such that you utilize their strengths to the best advantage of the group. Often Leadership model emphasizes the need to improve our weaknesses. However, the effort required to improve a weakness is tremendous. On the other hand, playing to your strengths is stress-free and devoting time to your strength makes you confident and an expert in that area. Strengthening an individual’s skills is more effective than developing new skills or trying to master weaknesses.
2. Empower — By empowering your teams, you build a team of Leaders. The philosophy of leading from wherever you are in the organization ensures that every team member feels accountable and empowered to execute. You want to develop strong individuals who get things done.
3. Accelerate Learning — Cross-train teams so they can support each other better. Accelerated Learning involves on-the-job training and helping out team members on smaller projects. This approach ensures backup and empathy towards each other, which results in an open and honest group. The latest concept of mirror resources is an excellent example of this model. You shadow-train mirror resources with your critical employees on essential skills. The mirrored resource can step in whenever required to complete a vital task and ensure continuous succession planning for the organization.
4. Mentor — As a Leader, you also have to be a Mentor for your teams. And as a Mentor, you need to build an environment where it’s okay to make mistakes(as long as we don’t make the same mistakes). Mistakes are indicators that you have tried something. Let your teams take risks in a controlled environment and be impactful. If you haven’t failed, you haven’t tried hard enough. Be approachable to all members of your teams and use each opportunity to mentor them.

In this post-pandemic era, we as leaders have a greater responsibility to be empathetic and understanding and simultaneously deliver results. With this four-element model, leaders can simultaneously cater to the needs of their employees, teams, organization, and customers.