I have simple rule, you get the team you deserve. But this doesn't mean that if you're a good person, the universe will reward you with a good team. bad person, the universe will punish you. If only life were that fair. What it means is simple. If you work hard, if you invest your time and your effort and your commitment in developing your team, then you will get a good team.

If on the other hand, you accept the team you've got with a fatalistic and you say, you know what, this law aren't very good, that that's what you will get. So what do you have to do to deserve the team that you want? Well, for my money, there are four essentials of creating a really good team. And the first essential is the individuals within the team. Recognize that a team is made up of of individuals and the strength of the team comes from the diversity of these those individuals. So your first essential is therefore to get to know and value every individual within your team.

And that's not hard, you speak to them, you listen to them, you share time with them. And the more you get to know with them, the more you get to know them, the better able you will be to deploy their strengths, and to offer them opportunities that will develop them in ways that will motivate and infuse them. And of course, another factor in that is that the more I get to know you, the more you get to know me. And the more you get to know me, the more you're likely to like me and trust me. So you're building that strength of team relationship, which will pay you back in the future. Now, we know that some individuals are easier to talk to than others.

So you have to discipline yourself to do that, but why When you do that, you put in place a strong focus on individuality, and you will reap the rewards. The second essential for team management is to have a good plan. A team needs a plan because they need the confidence and certainty that they know what they're doing. Human beings that don't have enough certainty, lack confidence and therefore lack enthusiasm and motivation. But on the other hand, when we find we've got too much certainty, our plan is too rigid. We feel constrained by it.

And that too, saps our motivation because we don't feel we have any autonomy in our lives. So getting the right balance of structure and autonomy is a challenge. Luckily, if you have got to know the individuals within the team, you will know the extent to which this individual prefers autonomy, and that individual prefers a little bit more structure. Use your team to help help you to develop the plan, not only because more brains make a better plan, although that's absolutely true. But if I were a team member, and I know I've contributed to the plan, then I are far more likely to have confidence in that plan. And certainly psychologically, my incentive will be to make the plan work, because it links back to me.

If on the other hand, you as a team leader, impose your plan upon your team without consulting them, and it's very easy for them to say, Well, I never thought it was gonna work anyway. There's no commitment. The third essential for good team management is to build a team spirit. Now, there's a lot that you can do with team building, and a lot of it's very expensive and doesn't work very well. For my money. The most valuable things that a team leader can do is to build rituals and traditions into their team.

Like simple things like a regular meeting on a Monday morning or a Wednesday afternoon, when we have our meetings, we always do it standing up, or we never do it without a good cup of coffee, celebrating people's birthdays, or taking some time on a Friday afternoon to chat, or having a regular social event. All of these things create a sense that we're in it together, we share something. And that gives people a sense of team spirit. do simple things, maybe even give your team a name. Before the sanction essential for good team management has to be communication. Now, when I started off managing teams, I thought communication was easy.

What it meant was making sure that I told all of my team members everything that they needed to know. Because without a doubt, if you're a team member and you feel your team leader is withholding information Don't feel trusted, you don't feel able to give the team your very best creativity and problem solving because you don't know enough of the context. And that worked really well for me for a while, until I found that my team started to know more than I did. So I started to realize that really good team communication required that I listen more than I speak. And that becomes a great way of arming yourself with information to share with other team members. The danger though, is that this becomes what's called a hub and spoke model in You are the hub.

And if you take the hub away, everything fails. You as Team Leader become the single point of failure for your team. So what I've realized is that I needed to create a team communication model, which went beyond this one, where individual members of the team spontaneously communicated with each other and builds up that network of communication Which meant that if I wasn't there, communication would still happen effectively. And by effectively, I mean that each individual takes responsibility for understanding who needs to know a particular piece of information who needs to be consulted on a particular question. And they will consult the right people and inform the right people without burdening others who don't need or want to be involved with the time overhead of those ubiquitous copy all emails. So, my four essentials of good team management, firstly, get to know get to value each individual, indeed, get to value them for who they are, what they can contribute, rather than what we do far more easily, which is to deprecate people for their shortcomings.

Secondly, build a plan for the team and build collaboratively with the team. Thirdly, create a sense of team spirit by doing something together as a team on a regular basis. And fourth, and finally, encourage a culture where everyone in the team takes responsibility for communicating with one another. That way your communication role becomes one of feeding information in and solving the most tricky problems and conflicts and disputes. For essentials, if you want to get a team you deserve fuel to deserve the team, you want