How to Build a Great Team, 2nd Edition

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Where do we go from here?

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8

CHAPTER

So you’ve done it – you’ve built a great team. Congratulations! Um...what

happens now? Well, if you sit back and do nothing, you’ll start to notice in

six months or a year’s time that it’s not quite such a great team as you

thought. That’s because teams don’t remain static or rather people don’t.

They get bored, they want new challenges, they are motivated by some-

thing different from what motivated them last year or the year before.

And the work changes as well: most successful teams generate growth,

which in turns leads to more people being taken on to fuel that growth.

And teams – especially successful ones – take on new responsibilities.

All these things have the potential to lead to conflict and confusion, or to

even greater success, depending on how you guide the team through them.

Strong, effective teams can give the impression of being invincible. They are

not. Sure, a really good team takes longer to break down than a weak and

ineffectual team, just as a strong, mature tree may endure several seasons

of bad weather that would have killed a less well rooted and established

tree, but any team will break down in the end if it isn’t tended and nurtured.

Most of the skills you need to sustain a successful team have already

been covered in this book in slightly different contexts. But it’s worth

bringing them together under one chapter to give you a clear picture of

where your priorities should lie once you have built your team. This

chapter will examine:

■ training

■ motivating a successful team

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