Team Lessons from a Slightly Less Tiny Leader

At my son's basketball game on the weekend I was amazed at the high-level ‘teaming’ the coach created.  I don’t mean the usual team chants and ‘hands in’ moments you see at most kid's sporting games, I mean real leadership ‘teaming’. What leaders of teams can learn from this one basketball game, could make the difference between a purposeless team and a performing one.

Here’s the context, it is half time and my son’s team has a significant points lead, this is important because this is usually where they might tend to get a little overconfident or complacent and I’ll be honest we’ve seen the game play out that way a few times. I‘ve also seen high-performing teams in the workplace take this same path. However, as they took the court for the 2nd half they looked excited, like they had something to chase. It showed in their play too, they were passing like champions, getting the ball to all players in the team and in particular the newest player of the team. When this player took a shot the whole team roared with encouragement and excitement. He missed but he got VERY close. My son came off the court excitedly chatting about the game. Not the 60-point lead they had just won by though, instead he came off the court discussing the team play in the second half, the team goal they’d set and how excited he was that they nearly achieved it. The coach (not yet 18 years of age) had taken a high-performing team and injected a new sense of purpose and enthusiasm into their 2nd half. He redirected their purpose from winning to getting the newest player his first basket. Why is this significant for teaming? I don’t know if this young coach realised or not the significance of this leadership moment but here’s my professional take on it. 

When your team is hitting their goals they have momentum or ‘energy’ as I like to think of it. Where you direct that energy or fail to direct that energy can have a significant impact on the team's longer-term performance. In this moment, when a team is performing at their peak moment, there are some obvious choices the leader will need to make. The choice to rest and recover, the choice to learn and challenge, the choice to push harder or go for an even bigger target, or the choice to do nothing (so as not to disrupt what’s working). Which one is the right choice is impossible to know, but working out the next best move can be as simple as asking, ‘What is the energy I want to create in the team?’ 

The coach in this instance, chose well. He chose to redirect the team's energy to a complimentary goal, it didn’t distract them from the skills or target they had been working towards, it did however re-energise them by giving them a slightly different pathway towards it. He gave them a purposeful direction, and in doing so he also created a stronger sense of team, taught them to lift each other up along the path to success and showed them how it can feel to invest in building the team, not just your own player points score. They’ll be better for it in the next game, of that I have no doubt. 

- meet my son -

We all fall into traps that impact the effectiveness of our team’s performance.  Are you guilty of any of these? 

• Overfocus on the stars - There are always a few ‘perceived’ stars in a team, and yes they should absolutely get recognition for what they are doing to achieve. Sometimes being a star means you’re always passed the ball (or work), so you work harder. We can also be distracted by the star and overlook the assists (like in basketball), these are the members or moments of the team whose small action or support enabled the outcome. As a leader, be mindful of who is assisting and make sure they get equal recognition for their contributions. Also, don’t always pass the work to the stars, you might be at risk of burning them out or impacting the development of the rest of the team.

• Go big or go home - When our team is performing we can be tempted to leave them be, push harder, raise the target or even redirect them to the next big thing. These teams often lose energy. No change can mean they feel stale while shifting goalposts leave them with no sense of achievement or appreciation for their effort. Maybe before you make another push to ‘go big’ you could celebrate the work achieved, put some intentional focus on their ‘home’ balance, and engage them to take stock. It's as simple as asking -  How did we get here? What do we need now? Where to next? A few conscious choices made ‘with’ the team could be the difference between their ability to maintain their energy, or them losing the energy just when you need it.

• Take the puff out of purpose  - most leaders are swept up in more than their fair share of work, focusing on ‘WHAT’ they're doing and losing sight of ‘WHY’ we are doing this work to begin with. Your teams are no different, sometimes we can get so focused on the doing that we lose sight of the purpose, and the energy having a clear ‘WHY’ can create. Re-ignite the WHY for your team's work with a story about the difference they've made, share positive feedback from a customer or stakeholder, and find some way to remind them of the impact they make. Or like my son's basketball coach find smaller purposes along the way to the bigger goal to keep them energised.

Depending on the context there are plenty more strategies you could use, but first, make sure you’re not falling into traps that prevent you from managing the energy of the team to perform.

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